sign of poor object-oriented design. a function should not be trying to return more than one thing. he uses the term thing because it is proper to return more than one value (e.g. returning a point that contains two values). if you are trying to return two values, the test he like to apply is whether you can come up with a logical name for the values as a group. if you can’t, you had better look to see if maybe you what you have is really two functions lumped together. 