If the caller knows whether it is interested in more than the first result, Lisps can have a calling convention where they tell the callee when they call, perhaps?
So single interesting return values, presumably the common case, are fast pathed.
And debuggers can patch this as they step through code, or they can just go the route of native debuggers and see what’s happening live even if there is only ever one result.
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This reply was modified 10 years, 6 months ago by
Will_Edwards.