From: Steven Jenkins <steven.jenkins@...>
Date: 2005-05-30T00:39:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Multiple return and parallel assignement

Christian Neukirchen wrote:
> Steven Jenkins <steven.jenkins@ieee.org> writes:
>>Dennis Ritchie has a degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. Brian
>>Kernighan was not one of the developers of C, although he co-authored a
>>famous book with Ritchie. And C functions have been able to return
>>aggregates for a long time, maybe since the beginning. They're called
>>structs and unions.
> 
> Actually, that is not true.  See 6.2 of "The C Programming Language"
> (1st ed): The original K&R C could not return compounds, only their
> addresses (which is not allowed for "auto" values, not thread-safe for
> "static" values and needs memory management for allocated values,
> therefore being totally inconvenient.)

Thanks for the clarification. Note that I did say "maybe since the
beginning".

> This feature must have been added before the 2nd edition (ANSI) was
> published, though.  My german version already knows about it, and that
> was released in 1983.  Then, I can't recall any code offhand that
> directly returned a structure...

The High-Order Calculator example in Kernighan and Pike (1984) has a
pop() function that returns a union.

This is not really on-topic any more, so let's let it go. Ritchie
himself has written extensively on the history of C; anyone who's
interested can find it easily.

Steve