Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: cyber_surfer@wildcard.demon.co.uk (Cyber Surfer)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!demon!wildcard.demon.co.uk!cyber_surfer
Subject: Re: Urgent! Help! Return more than one argument.
References: <3c3es0$19s@masala.cc.uh.edu> <D0JGt5.G0@rheged.dircon.co.uk> <LOU.94Dec11234819@athos.rutgers.edu>
Organization: The Wildcard Killer Butterfly Breeding Ground
Reply-To: cyber_surfer@wildcard.demon.co.uk
X-Newsreader: Demon Internet Simple News v1.27
Lines: 21
X-Posting-Host: wildcard.demon.co.uk
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 1994 16:49:42 +0000
Message-ID: <787337382snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk>
Sender: usenet@demon.co.uk

In article <LOU.94Dec11234819@athos.rutgers.edu>
           lou@cs.rutgers.edu "Lou Steinberg" writes:

> I take it then that by your aesthetics multiple function *arguments*
> are also inelegant?  After all, all we really need is a single
> argument to each function.  If we want to pass more arguments we can
> just cons up a list of them.

That's exactly what some functional languages do. FP and Hope, for
example. It's also what some Lisp interpreters do, internally. I used
a global table for (multiple) return values in my interpreter, but
cheated with macro functions. In CL, I believe they should accept
just two arguments, one for the macro expression, and the other for
the enviroment.

What I like about Hope is that the syntax for tuples looks like the
syntax for function arguments in many other languages. Hope makes
it easy to destructure the tuple in the function equations.
-- 
CommUnity: ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/archives/community
Me: http://cyber.sfgate.com/examiner/people/surfer.html
