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:

1. We call vals() and assign its two return values to a and b using the syntax [a, b] = vals().
2. We then print these values using the disp() function.
3. 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.