Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!ucbvax!WORLD.STD.COM!bzs
From: bzs@WORLD.STD.COM (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: C's sins of commission (was: (pssst...fortran?))
Message-ID: <9010031449.AA02400@world.std.com>
Date: 3 Oct 90 14:49:51 GMT
References: <14197@netcom.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 27


>Okay, I hate sounding like an ignoramus, but just WHERE do you get the 
>ability to return tuples? 

You mean what language supports this feature? Common Lisp, it's in the
Guy Steele book. You need all sorts of additional operators to support
it like a parallel assignment statement.

The (more than) rumor I heard was that Symbolics successfully lobbied
to have multiple-value-return put into the common lisp standard
because there was something about their hardware that made this very
desireable (I think it was that the top of their return stack, the
first 256 bytes, was made of very fast stuff mapped into memory.)

So the whole thing may have been a hoax (as far as any abstract
motivations were concerned.)

It didn't really add anything useful to the language that people
hadn't been doing for decades by returning a list (it is a LISt
Processor..., but that's the same basic crew that added hunks and
hasharrays and all sorts of other non-lists, some useful, some sorta
dumb.)

        -Barry Shein

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