My little language Magpie has a feature that may at first seem really limiting: all functions take exactly one argument and return one value, no more, no less. I’ll try to explain why I made that choice, and some of the surprising benefits of it.

It feels weird explaining a programming language that literally no one on Earth is using, but my hope is that in the future people will be using Magpie, and this might come in handy. At the very least, it’ll help me remember where I’m at.

First off, a quick primer in Magpie syntax. Here’s a function to square a number:

Square ( n Int -> Int ) n * n

The name comes first, followed by the type signature in parentheses. To the left of the -> is the argument, to the right is the return type. The body of the function is the single expression n * n . Like Ruby and most functional languages, returning is implicit: a function returns the result of evaluating its body.

You can call it like this:

Square 3 // returns 9

Unlike C and other languages, function arguments aren’t put inside parentheses.

So What If I Want to Pass in Multiple Args?

That’s easy. Here’s a function to multiply three numbers:

Mult ( a Int , b Int , c Int -> Int ) a * b * c

You can call it like:

Mult ( 2 , 3 , 4 ) // returns 24

Hey! I Thought You Said Functions Always Take One Argument!

They do, they do. However, Magpie also supports tuples. A tuple lets you make a single value by combining others together. In Magpie, tuples are created using the comma operator:

( 1 , 2 ) // a tuple of two Int fields ( 2 , true , "three" ) // a tuple of three fields of different type

(They are also placed inside parentheses, but you can more or less ignore that. It’s more for precedence reasons than anything else. The comma is where the magic is.)

So, when you see a call like Mult (2, 3, 4) what you’re really seeing is calling Mult with a single argument, the tuple (2, 3, 4) .

Are You Just Playing Semantics?

No, this isn’t just a semantic trick. Mult really does take a single value. I’ll prove it:

// create a local variable and assign a tuple to it def arg <- ( 2 , 3 , 4 ) // pass the single argument to the function Mult arg

This is perfectly legit in Magpie and doesn’t require function overloading or anything. In fact, this is kind of useful. When you start playing with function references (i.e. callbacks), it’s really convenient to be able to pass around arguments to functions without needing to distinguish between how many arguments it takes: it always takes one.

Neat Trick. What About Functions With No Arguments?

That actually uses tuples too, sort of. You can make a tuple out of any number of values, including one and zero. A single value is a one-value tuple (a monuple?). But you can also have a tuple with no values, strange as that sounds. There’s exactly one of them (how could there be different ones?) It’s called “Unit”, and looks like () . So if you had a function like this:

SayHi ( -> ) Print "hi!"

You could call it like this:

SayHi () // prints "hi"

That’s a bit tedious, though, so in most cases you can omit the () and Magpie will infer it:

SayHi // prints "hi"

What About Returns? I Don’t See Print Returning Anything.

Sure, it is. Just like Unit can be omitted as an argument, it’s also omitted as a return. Print returns () every time it’s called. Since a function returns the result of evaluating its body, that means SayHi also returns () .

What’s The Point?

What that gives us is the ability to make everything in Magpie an expression: since you can return Unit like a value, Magpie doesn’t need to make a distinction between expressions (which return things) and statements (which don’t). This means that things like flow control can be regular expressions in Magpie. For example:

Square ( if 1 < 2 then 3 else 4 )

This calls the Square function and passes in 3. We can do this because if/then/else is a regular expression and can be used anywhere.

So having “nothing” be a returnable value lets us make the language a lot more flexible.

You Still Forgot One Case…

And, of course, this also means you can return multiple values, just like you can in Python or Lua:

Swap ( a Int , b Int -> ( Int , Int )) ( b , a ) Swap ( 1 , 2 ) // returns (2, 1)

So, in the end, it isn’t much of a limitation at all.