On Friday, 31 May 2013 at 00:50:56 UTC, bearophile wrote:
Manu:
I've raised the topic of multiple-return-values a whole heap
of times. It's
usually shot down because it would create ambiguities in
existing syntax.
Solving only that small problem is a bad idea. A language meant
to support some functional programming should be able to
support tuples well enough. Your problem is a special case of
tuple usage. Don't you agree?
Bye,
bearophile
The question is which is more optimal for the MRV style of
programming
// here the compiler can decide the best way to return the two
ints,
// probably in two registers, maybe even better for inlining
(int, int) positionMRV() { return 1, 2; }
// here the compiler is making a tuple and returning it may not
be optimal
#(int, int) positionTuple() { return #(1, 2); } //assuming #()
for tuples
I agree tuples cover more cases, but maybe hard to optimize for
MRV.
a side note := could be use to extract tuples as well.
Would be nice if _ was not a valid identifier, could have been
used it for value skipping:
x, _ := positionMRV(); // only care about x value, optimize away
