slashnull

Ha! Excellent.

Thank you.

Death of a thousand cuts, then.

Sad.

Thanks for the input.

Ok, interesting response, thank you.

But there's a point I'd like to be clarified, if possible: it's not the first time I read that XML is bad in some abstract way, so I'd really be interested in knowing how was XML's rep "destroyed"?

I loved that comic, and your post led me to believe that XKCD had yet another easter-egg thing and that Randal set up a server for an anonymous chatroom accessible one way or another from this comic page, but after poking around the DOM and checking the image for shady things and so on and so forth, and I didn't find anything.

The XKCD foras don't seem to know anything I don't, either.

I invite you to either clarify this title ("XKCD jokes about undocumented features", perhaps) or to prove me wrong.

The given answer is a hack.

The real answer is "most languages can return multiple values", since whenever structs were introduced. And if you're bugged by the fact that there are multiple input parameters, well, just think of the list of params as a tuple. Which you could picture as anonymous structs anyways.

So that in the end, all functions take one tuple and return one tuple, where tuples can be called structs, classes, or, well, tuples.

The real question being, why is it that there is a syntactic sugar for anonymous input structs but that the sugar for output structs is just being introduced.

And there I have to admit I have no idea why.