Question

I’d like to return a Cartesian coordinate (x, y), as two ints. The only way I see is to create a class and return an instance of it.

How to return two values from a method in Objective C?

Answer 1

You can only return one value from a function (just like C), but the value can be anything, including a struct. And since you can return a struct by value, you can define a function like this (to borrow your example):

-(NSPoint)scalePoint:(NSPoint)pt by:(float)scale
{
    return NSMakePoint(pt.x*scale, pt.y*scale);
}

This is only really appropriate for small/simple structs.

If you want to return more than one new object, your function should take pointers to the object pointer, thus:

-(void)mungeFirst:(NSString**)stringOne andSecond:(NSString**)stringTwo
{
    *stringOne = [NSString stringWithString:@"foo"];
    *stringTwo = [NSString stringWithString:@"baz"];
}