Question

Just curious is there any technical limitation in having multiple return values for methods in languages like java, c, c++ or limitation is just by spec? In assembly language I understand callee can pop one value to register.

Answer 1

1. Because in the days of C there is/was a single register used to hold the return value.
2. Because if you need more values, you can just return a struct, reference (in Java/C#), or pointer.
3. Because you can use an out parameter.

Allowing multiple return values would add complexity, and it’s simply worked around. There’s no reason for it to be there. (Indeed, in C++ you can return a tuple (from TR1, C++11, or boost) which effectively is multiple return values)