Tuples citizenship

[renoX]

On Friday, 2 March 2012 at 10:13:17 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> If the function uses out, then you can chain the return value 
> without losing
> the values which were assigned to the out arguments, but if you 
> have a tuple,
> and you select one of the elements in the tuple to chain, you 
> lose the others.
> The only way to get _all_ of the values in the tuple is to 
> assign the tuple to
> a variable, in which case, you can't chain at all.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Sure, but due to D's syntax which doesn't distinguish in/out/ref 
params in a function call, this is quite confusing to read: when 
you read f(x,y) which is in, which is out? If D's syntax was 
f(x, at y) (@ to distinguish out or ref parameter), this would be 
easy to read, but this isn't the case.

At least with tuples you don't have this issue.

Not that I consider tuples always the good answer: for the common 
use case where you want to return an error code and a result, the 
Maybe "monad" is better..

BR,
renoX