Open Radar

 
Every now and then I find I sort of wish Objective-C had a Perl-like (and probably other languages) ability to return multiple values from an array into individually named variables without needing to deal with the array explicitly all the time.

Example:

(NSString *title, NSString *otherThing, NSNumber *somethingElse) = [info getArrayOfThings];

In this case, -getArrayOfThings would return a normal NSArray - nothing special there and no need for any annotations or anything. All this would do is, when compiling, it would generate code like the following:

NSArray *_tempArray = [info getArrayOfThings];
NSString *title = [_tempArray objectAtIndex:0];
NSString *otherThing = [_tempArray objectAtIndex:1];
NSNumber *somethingElse = [_tempArray objectAtIndex:2];

If the array is not big enough, it'd fail at runtime in the same way as if I had written the code explicitly and tried to get something at an index that didn't exist in the array.

Seems like it'd be handy on occasion, anyway, but I admit it's current nonexistence is not exactly a glaring deficiency in the language or anything like that.