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From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: standard extensions to programming languages
Message-ID: <1991Mar04.154439.10325@convex.com>
Date: 4 Mar 91 15:44:39 GMT
References: <1991Feb25.201406.18643@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> <3439.27ca4e40@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com> <.LR9UA4@xds13.ferranti.com>
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Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
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From the keyboard of peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva):
:In article <3439.27ca4e40@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com> herrickd@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com (daniel lance herrick) writes:
:> when what I want is
:>         (q, r) = dividend divided by divisor
:
:Than you need a different programming language. 

Pretty easy in perl: functions can return scalars or lists.  It's
quite common to say:

    ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size,
       $atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks)
           = stat($filename);

Which is nice -- I like the named variables.  Others just stick it in 
one array, convenient if you're doing stats on various files:

    @statb = stat($filename);

For your division and remainder problem, you could just define a trivial
subroutine as follows:

    sub divrem { ($_[0] / $_[1], $_[0] % $_[1]); } 

and then say stuff like:

    ($q, $r) = &divrem(7,2);


--tom