cameron@usage.csd.oz (Cameron Simpson,Uhmmm..???? Who knows) (10/01/90)
From article <5055@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au>, by brendan@batserver.cs.uq.oz.au (Brendan Mahony): | aahz@netcom.UUCP (Dan Bernstein) writes: |>Okay, I hate sounding like an ignoramus, but just WHERE do you get the |>ability to return tuples? | | Not sure what you mean. Are you questioning the theoretical possibility | or are you simply telling us that this facility does not exist in C? It | does exist in some (functional) languages and is a simple extension to a | procedural languages run-time stack conventions. If your problem is the | second then I think you have lost this thread as we are discussing the | inadequacies of C, and other "industrial" programming languages. Of course, in C you can get the effect by returning a struct. The notation is more cumbersome, but the `ability' is there. Even perl will return tuples. - Cameron Simpson cameron@spectrum.cs.unsw.oz.au
gilham@csl.sri.com (Fred Gilham) (10/04/90)
Barry Shein writes:
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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.)
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If I remember correctly, Guy Steele used `values' in his paper,
`Lambda, the Ultimate Imperative,' written in the late 70s. I don't
remember why he used it, but the whole paper was abstractly motivated.
--
Fred Gilham gilham@csl.sri.com
``But, till the revolution comes we gonna party, party, party!''
(Does anyone know who wrote this?)