Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!metro!usage.csd.unsw.oz.au!spectrum!cameron
From: cameron@usage.csd.oz (Cameron Simpson,Uhmmm..???? Who knows)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: returning tuples ...
Message-ID: <873@usage.csd.unsw.oz.au>
Date: 1 Oct 90 14:30:45 GMT
References: <5055@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au>
Sender: news@usage.csd.unsw.oz.au
Reply-To: cameron@spectrum.cs.unsw.oz.au (Cameron Simpson)
Organization: none
Lines: 16

From article <5055@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au>, by brendan@batserver.cs.uq.oz.au (Brendan Mahony):
| aahz@netcom.UUCP (Dan Bernstein) writes:
|>Okay, I hate sounding like an ignoramus, but just WHERE do you get the 
|>ability to return tuples? 
| 
| Not sure what you mean. Are you questioning the theoretical possibility
| or are you simply telling us that this facility does not exist in C? It
| does exist in some (functional) languages and is a simple extension to a
| procedural languages run-time stack conventions. If your problem is the
| second then I think you have lost this thread as we are discussing the
| inadequacies of C, and other "industrial" programming languages.

Of course, in C you can get the effect by returning a struct. The notation
is more cumbersome, but the `ability' is there. Even perl will return tuples.
	- Cameron Simpson
	  cameron@spectrum.cs.unsw.oz.au