Re: Multiple return values

Arthur Chance wrote:
> Most programming languages allow procedures with multiple arguments
> (in some cases allowing them to be used in curried form as well), but
> very few languages allow multiple return values, in spite of the fact
> that multiple results *are* multiple arguments when you're wearing
> CPS-tinted glasses. Why is this?


CLU has multiple return values -- more by necessity than convenience
because CLU doesn't really have a pointer type. So you can do


r, theta := rect2polar (x, y)


for example. You can also do


if x < y then
x, y := y, x
end


though this is slightly less useful than you might imagine since


if x[i] < y[i] then
x[i], y[i] := y[i], x[i]
end


because you can't have procedure calls on the left hand side of an
assignment (functions can't return references to objects and x[i] is
syntactic sugar for T$get(x, i))


--
John Haxby
jch@pwd.hp.com http://www.ice.hp.com/
--

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