Re: Handling variable number of output arguments in multi-level function calls

[Philip Nienhuis]

Jose wrote
> Dear community.
> 
> I often face the situation in which a function (say f1) calls another 
> function internally (say f2) whose number of outputs depends on the 
> number of outputs requested from the upper calling function f1. 
> Something like this
> --->
> function [o1,o2]=f1(varargin)
>    ...
>    if nargout==1
>      [o1]=f2(varargin{:});
>    elseif nargout==2
>      [o1,o2]=f2(varargin{:});
>    endif
>    ...
> endfunction
> <---
> This example shows how I am handling the problem of calling f2 with the 
> right number of output arguments. I suspect that this is something that 
> other users also face often, and I also suspect that there might be a 
> better way to handle this (one can imagine easily how the code gets 
> cluttered in case there are many output arguments).
> 
> Does somebody know a more elegant (and perhaps more efficient?) way to 
> handle this?

"code gets cluttered" - that depends on what one calls "cluttered". That's a
question of coding discipline.
There are the standard ways to keep code readable and maintainable as much
as possible:
- code layout
- subfunctions
- to-the-point comments
- plus more sophisticated stuff (doxygen, ...)

AFAIK nargout is the most suitable way to deal with output depending on the
number of requested output args.

There are other ways, like
[~, ~, outarg3, ~, outarg5] = foobar (varargin) 
that uses only output arguments #3 and#5 and skips the rest. But then the
selection of which outargs to use is made by the caller, not the called
function (foobar). Then foobar() will always compute all output args,
whether requested or not , which depending on the case at hand may be a
negligible or significant waste of CPU cycles.

Another way is to return outputs (don't forget to at least initialize all)
depending on the number of input args to foobar().

I think that's about all the choice there is.

Philip



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