Re: Out parameters in a function

["Kent Paul Dolan" <xanthian@well.com>]

"Jim Rogers" <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net> wrote:

> Well, almost. C does not have a boolean type.

Sorry, of course you're correct.  The standard C include files have
defined TRUE and FALSE for so long and I've used them for so long I tend
to forget they aren't, per se, part of C, but just some of those
programming "implicit contracts" spoken of in another thread.

[And my usual usage before they came along was always:

#define TRUE ( 0 == 0 )
#define FALSE ( 0 == 1 )

anyway, since I didn't want to be dependent on a particular compiler
writer's picking the usual choice of treatments of 0 versus non-zero as
true or false, which I should have remembered.]

> C (since its first
> ANSI standard) does support returning structures. It could always
> return a pointer to a structure.

> Ada does not have the same sense of expressions as C.
> Specifically, an assignment operator in Ada does not return a value.

That is probably both good and bad; good, because stack cleanups or
alternate compilation paths for unused optionally produced values aren't
an issue; in this case unfortunate, since it prevents a fairly natural
way to accomplish what the original poster was seeking.  Not that the
obvious way of breaking the suggestion I presented down into several
steps won't work, it is just much more awkward than using
value-providing assignment statements or polyadic valued functions.

Thanks for the corrections and further advice.

> Jim Rogers

xanthian, happiest probably programming in languages where one can
return a list of values from a procedure.


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