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

As for Java, see Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java for a nice solution (pp. 621 ff).

In essence, you can define a class equivalent to the following:

public class Pair {
    public final T left;
    public final U right;
    public Pair (T t, U u) { left = t; right = u; }
}

You can then use this as the return type for a function, with appropriate type parameters:

public Pair getAnswer() {
    return new Pair("the universe", 42);
}

After invoking that function:

Pair myPair = getAnswer();

you can refer to myPair.left and myPair.right for access to the constituent values.

There are other syntactical sugar options, but the above is the key point.