Woo, another goal ticked off on the roadmap. Plasma now supports functions that return any number of results.

Whenever you want to return more than one result from a function, it’s always bothered me how doing this in C and many other languages is pretty clumsy:

int do_something(int input, int *second_output);

Of course some languages you can use tupling to achieve the same affect, such as Haskell.

do_something :: Int -> (Int, Int)

But I’ve always felt that this doesn’t directly represent what the developer is asking. They want to actually return multiple things, and not have the accidental complexity of saying "this returns a tuple". This may be splitting hairs, maybe it is and so I’ll move on to my next point.

I’d prefer a language implementation to support this directly in its native calling convention (like Prolog or Mercury), and not handle it as an optimisation that eliminates the memory allocation of the tuple. In other words, when there are multiple inputs that are handled directly by the calling convention, which says where to place them in registers and the stack. I would like the same treatment of output arguments, they should likewise just be left in registers and the stack as a sensible calling convention would allow. I’m not aware of a common C calling convention that does that, but I’m not writing a C compiler so that’s only important when dealing with foreign code. Therefore I want a language that supports this directly rather than having developers rely on optimisations working as they expect.

Plasma now supports functions that return any number of values (0 or more). In this example pm() returns both the absolute value and negative absolute value of its input.

func pm(x : Int) -> Int, Int {
    if (x < 0) {
        x_abs = x * -1
    } else {
        x_abs = x
    }
    return x_abs, x_abs * -1
}

Some examples of things that return multiple results like this are the quadratic formula and integer division (return the quotient and remainder). Of course there are plenty of situations, particularly with functional programming styles, where returning multiple results is common.

Functions can also return no results. In a pure language such as Plasma this only makes sense if they have some effect on the world. Printing a result is a good example:

func do_pm(x : Int) using IO {
    p, m = pm(x)
    print!("p: " ++ int_to_string(p) ++ ", m: " ++ int_to_string(m) ++ "\n")
}

In Plasma there is no void symbol like in languages like C. Instead a function simply returns no results like do_pm() above..

Later when expression versions of if and match statements are added, they will also support multiple results. For example:

func pm2(x : Int) -> Int, Int {
    neg_x = x * -1
    return if x < 0 then neg_x, x else x, neg_x
}

Plasma is beginning to really take shape. I’m feeling rather excited; I think the time when people will want to try it out for some small tasks is getting noticeably closer.