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From: dsr@abraxas.cs.Virginia.EDU (Dana Richards)
Newsgroups: comp.theory
Subject: Re: Procedures with multiple out parameters: why not?
Message-ID: <1990Aug16.173415.2679@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 16 Aug 90 17:34:15 GMT
References: <1990Aug15.231838.5664@zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu> <21458@grebyn.com>
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Reply-To: dsr@abraxas.cs.Virginia.EDU (Dana Richards)
Organization: University of Virginia Computer Science Department
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In article <21458@grebyn.com> dlawson@grebyn.UUCP (Drew Lawson) writes:
>In article <1990Aug15.231838.5664@zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu> vidynath@function.mps.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyarath K Rao) writes:
<<
<<
<<While there is a lot of well-known [i.e. I have heard of them :-^] articles
<<on the goto statement, I have never seen heard of the theoreticians' case
<<against having more than one out parameter. None of the reasons I could
<<think of relates to theory. Can somebody out there give some pointers?
<<
<
<I don't have any references to this, but the attitude I have beed
<exposed to which agrees with it is that procedures/functions should
<not both return a value and alter parameters.  The problems can be similar
<to the goto problems: it is less obvious what the flow is (in this case
<the data flow rather than the control flow).

on  a related note:  why does sedgewick's book not have any VAR parameters?
(he does have global variables of course).

dana richards