Multiple Return Values in Scilab
Scilab has support for returning multiple values from a function, which is similar to the concept in the original example. Here’s how we can implement this in Scilab:
function [a, b] = vals()
a = 3;
b = 7;
endfunction
function main()
// Here we use the 2 different return values from the
// call with multiple assignment.
[a, b] = vals();
disp(a);
disp(b);
// If you only want a subset of the returned values,
// you can use the underscore _ as a placeholder.
[_, c] = vals();
disp(c);
endfunction
main();
In Scilab, we define a function vals()
that returns two values. The function [a, b] = vals()
syntax indicates that this function will return two values, which will be assigned to a
and b
.
In the main()
function, we demonstrate how to use these multiple return values:
- We call
vals()
and assign its two return values toa
andb
using the syntax[a, b] = vals()
. - We then print these values using the
disp()
function. - To demonstrate how to ignore one of the return values, we use
[_, c] = vals()
. In Scilab, the underscore_
is not a special character, so we’re just using it as a conventional variable name to indicate that we’re not interested in this value.
To run this program in Scilab, you would typically save it to a file (e.g., multiple_return_values.sce
) and then execute it in the Scilab console:
--> exec('multiple_return_values.sce')
3.
7.
7.
Note that Scilab doesn’t have a built-in concept of a “main” function like some other languages. The code outside of function definitions is executed when the script is run, so we’ve wrapped our main code in a main()
function and then called it at the end of the script to mimic this behavior.
This example demonstrates how Scilab can handle multiple return values from functions, which is a powerful feature for many scientific and numerical computing tasks.