How do you return two values from a single method?

Question

When your in a situation where you need to return two things in a single method, what is the best approach?

I understand the philosophy that a method should do one t

Answer 1

This is not entirely language-agnostic: in Lisp, you can actually return any number of values from a function, including (but not limited to) none, one, two, ...

(defun returns-two-values ()
  (values 1 2))

The same thing holds for Scheme and Dylan. In Python, I would actually use a tuple containing 2 values like

def returns_two_values():
   return (1, 2)

As others have pointed out, you can return multiple values using the out parameters in C#. In C++, you would use references.

void 
returns_two_values(int& v1, int& v2)
{
    v1 = 1; v2 = 2;
}

In C, your method would take pointers to locations, where your function should store the result values.

void 
returns_two_values(int* v1, int* v2)
{
    *v1 = 1; *v2 = 2;
}

For Java, I usually use either a dedicated class, or a pretty generic little helper (currently, there are two in my private "commons" library: Pair and Triple, both nothing more than simple immutable containers for 2 resp. 3 values)