Re: something that would be nice

[Matt Austern <austern at apple dot com>]

On Nov 11, 2003, at 2:49 PM, Matt Wells wrote:

> Hi,
>
> My name is Matt Wells and I'm the sole creator of the internet's 
> soon-to-be
> largest search engine, http://www.gigablast.com/ .
>
> I have many functions that return an integer value, positive, zero or
> negative so I can't really say "this function returns -1 and
> sets errno on error" because -1 is a legit value for my
> function to return. Passing in a pointer to the extra value(s) I would 
> like
> returned is, in my view, sloppy and potentially confusing.
>
> So my question is... would it be easy to make functions return multiple
> values?

I recommend you take this issue up with the C standards committee.  I'd
hate to add this as a local extension to C: local extensions tend to 
cause
lots of problems, because it's hard to specify all of their corner 
cases and
all of the ways they interact with existing language features.

(Or, alternatively, you could use some language other than C.  ML, C++,
and Python, for example, all make it easy to do what you're looking 
for.)

			--Matt