Elegant ways to return multiple values from a function

Question

It seems like in most mainstream programming languages, returning multiple values from a function is an extremely awkward thing.

The typical soluti

Answer 1

Pretty much all ML-influenced functional langues (which is most of them) also have great tuple support that makes this sort of thing trivial.

For C++ I like boost::tuple plus boost::tie (or std::tr1 if you have it)

typedef boost::tuple XYZ;

XYZ foo();

double x,y,z;
boost::tie(x,y,z) = foo();

or a less contrived example

MyMultimap::iterator lower,upper;
boost::tie(lower,upper) = some_map.equal_range(key);