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[Python-ideas] values in vs. values out

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Thu Jan 13 16:27:19 CET 2011 
Luc Goossens wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> There's a striking asymmetry between the wonderful flexibility in 
> passing values into functions (positional args, keyword args, default 
> values, *args, **kwargs, ...) and the limited options for processing the 
> return values (assignment).

You're not limited to returning tuples. You could return an object with 
named attributes, or a namedtuple, or even just a dict. There's 
precedence in the standard library, for example, os.stat.

Except in the case of tuple unpacking, this does mean that assigning the 
result of the function call is a two stage procedure:

t = func(x, y, z)
a, b, c = t.spam, t.ham, t.cheese

but it does give you flexibility in adding new return fields without 
having to update function calls that don't use the new fields.



-- 
Steven
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