Multiple Return Values in Miranda

Java has built-in support for multiple return values through the use of custom objects or arrays. This feature is often used in idiomatic Java 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 array destructuring to assign the returned 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 this array to get multiple return values.

We first assign the entire array to a variable result, and then extract individual values from it. This is similar to multiple assignment in some other languages.

If you only want a subset of the returned values, you can simply access the desired index of the array directly, as shown with the variable c.

While this approach works, it’s worth noting that for more complex scenarios or when the types of return values differ, it’s often better to create a custom class to hold the multiple return values. This provides more type safety and clarity in the code.

Accepting a variable number of arguments (varargs) is another feature available in Java, which we’ll look at next.