Good style for multi-valued returns

[Mitch Chapman]

Cameron Laird wrote:
> 
> Examples of multi-valued returns:  (head, tail); (quotient,
> remainder); (left, right); (prologue, body, epilogue);
> (data, code); (CAR, CDR); (count, size); (handle, status);
> (decomposition; remainder); ...
> 
> Let me guess:  folks generally pass tuples for small and
> determinate-in-number multi-values, and dictionaries other-
> wise, 'cept some do it all with tuples.  Accurate?

If there are many returned values, I tend to define a new class 
for the return type rather than returning a dictionary.  This
usually pays off, because the consumers of those return values 
often want to perform the same sorts of operations on the values.  
If I start off representing the return value as a dictionary,
clients duplicate the logic for those operations.  If I start off
with a class for the new return type, those operations get
expressed once, as methods of the new class.

--
Mitch Chapman
chapman at bioreason.com