Multiple Return Values in Karel

Java has built-in support for returning multiple values from a method using custom objects or arrays. This feature can be used to return both result and error values from a method.

import java.util.Arrays;

public class MultipleReturnValues {

    // This method returns an array of two integers
    public static int[] vals() {
        return new int[]{3, 7};
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Here we use the returned array and assign its values
        int[] result = vals();
        int a = result[0];
        int b = result[1];
        System.out.println(a);
        System.out.println(b);

        // If you only want a subset of the returned values,
        // you can ignore some values by not assigning them
        int c = vals()[1];
        System.out.println(c);
    }
}

To run the program:

$ javac MultipleReturnValues.java
$ java MultipleReturnValues
3
7
7

In Java, we don’t have built-in support for multiple return values like in some other languages. However, we can achieve similar functionality by returning an array or a custom object. In this example, we used an array to return multiple values.

The vals() method returns an array of two integers. In the main method, we demonstrate how to use these returned values:

1. We assign the entire array to a variable and then access its elements.
2. We show how to access only a specific element of the returned array if you’re only interested in a subset of the values.

Note that Java doesn’t have a direct equivalent to the blank identifier (_) used in some other languages. If you want to ignore a value, you simply don’t assign it to a variable.

Accepting a variable number of arguments (varargs) is another feature available in Java; we’ll look at this in the next example.