Re: More than one values returned?

Nathan Nobbe wrote: > On Mon, Feb 18, 2008 at 9:06 PM, Nick Stinemates <nick@stinemates.org > <mailto:nick@stinemates.org>> wrote: > > Thats a good example, and a good reason for passing values by > Reference > instead of by Value. > > I have found, however, that if I ever need to return /multiple/ > values, > it's usually because of bad design and/or the lack of proper > encapsulation. > > > and this is what i was responding to earlier, nick, although you didnt > criticize > pass-by-reference directly you essentially said use of it indicates > bad design, > which i disagree with. > check my post where i show a method with a boolean return value that has a > pass-by-reference parameter to return data; that is a perfectly > reasonable use > case for pass-by-reference and it does not indicate bad design. nor > would it, if > there were more pass-by-reference parameters in that method. If I said passing by reference was a bad design, C/C++ programmers all over the world would call me an idiot. Coming from a C background, I would definitely agree with them. Passing by reference and returning an array of objects out of convenience, I think, are completely separate. As for that specific quote, I don't see how it criticizes by reference arguments. If you took it that way, I can only assure you I will (try to) speak more coherently ;) > > and here is another reason you might have to return more than on value > from a > method; a function needs to return data of different types. now php > is loosely > typed, so packaging these into an array is a joke, but in other > languages, that > are strongly typed, its not quite that simple. any way, when i think > about a method > returning a class, what if for whatever reason, a method were to > return objects of > 2 classes ? do you then create another class just for the purpose of > packaging those > 2 objects for this method to return a single value? Of course, it _always_ depends. This is why in all of this argument i said it was an *indication* not 100% of the time. My only argument is, if you need 2 classes, or 2 sets of data, and you'll need it in more than 1 place (ever) then it would be in your interest to group them. Let's take, for example, the getGroup method I've been using. If I make a change to the update() method (in an extreme example, adding a parameter to it that wasn't there before,) I am going to have to go back through all of my code, and ensure it's being used properly. Instead, if I had a Group object that managed bulk operations on Users, I would only need to update 1 area, and the maintenance on the client code decreases drastically. > well ill let you be the judge of that, but i would probly toss them in > a small array, or, > depending on the scenario, use pass-by-reference, especially if i > wanted to return > a boolean value from the method ;) > > -nathan If it calls for passing and object or 2 by reference, I think that's great. -- ================== Nick Stinemates (nick@stinemates.org) http://nick.stinemates.org AIM: Nick Stinemates MSN: nickstinemates@hotmail.com Yahoo: nickstinemates@yahoo.com ==================