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From: shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Multiple Return values in Common Lisp.
Message-ID: <4076@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 5-Dec-86 10:41:03 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-cs.4076
Posted: Fri Dec  5 10:41:03 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 5-Dec-86 20:59:10 EST
References: <15257@kestrel.ARPA>
Reply-To: shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs)
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 21

For those who need academic approval for features of Common Lisp, I offer
Peter Henderson's book "Functional Programming: Application and
Implementation", page 269:

"For practical purposes, however, ... our purely functional language [is]
in fact very rudimentary, and some very simple extensions would greatly
enhance its ability to express clearly certain classes of computation.
... That purely syntactic extensions can have great power, in terms of
improved clarity of expression, is illustrated by the extension which we
now undertake."

"We extend our purely functional language to allow functions to return
multiple results. ..."

He then goes on to describe some constructs which are essentially VALUES
and MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND in CL.  CL's multiple values are somewhat more
complicated, partly because it needs to work with the rest of the language,
and partly because Henderson's version has some undesirable limitations
(must always have exact match of multiplicities, for instance).

							stan