Ralph "PJPizza" Siegler wrote:
> On Sat, May 21, 2005 at 01:30:13AM +0900, James Britt wrote:
>> Eric Mahurin wrote:
>>> I've never quite understood why most languages inherently
>>> support returning only a single value
>>
>>
>> Conceptual elegance?
>>
>> Seems cleaner to say that every expression returns an object, though
>> that the object may be a container for other objects, rather than
>> assert that expressions may return an unknown number of objects
>>
>>
>> James
>>
>
> I also think it may be from the original mathematical idea of a
> "function', which only has 1 output value for a given set of inputs,

Mathematical functions are in no way limited to yielding a single output
value.

> which 3rd generation programming languages adopted as paradigm.  With
> multiple return values, more in the mindset of a "relation", an n to
> m mapping

That's what a mathematical function is basically.  Don't let sin, cos,
max, min etc. fool you on this one. :-)

Kind regards

    robert