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

Both Lua and CLU (by Barbara Liskov's group at MIT) have multiple return values for all functions---it is always the default. I believe the designers of Lua were inspired by CLU. I like having multiple values be the default for calls and returns; I think it is a very elegant way of thinking about things. In Lua and CLU this mechanism is completely independent of tuples and/or records.

The portable assembly language C-- supports multiple return values for its native calling convention but not for the C calling convention. There the idea is to enable a compiler writer to return multiple values in individual hardware registers rather than having to put the values in a clump in memory and return a pointer to that clump (or as in C, have the caller pass a pointer to an empty clump).

Like any mechanism, multiple return values can be abused, but I don't think it is any more unreasonable to have a function return multiple values than it is to have a struct contain multiple values.