How to deal with out parameters in F#

This is the third installment of my modest 'how to' series, where I try to highlight some in my opinion unappreciated (or under-marketed) gems of F#: little language features that pleasantly surprised me when I first learned about them.

Don't you hate out parameters? It's such a chore to use them: you need to declare a variable, pass it in the method with the out parameter modifier, and then check the results. Out parameters suck: they're just a poor excuse for not having to add a decent tuple type to your language. Unfortunately, some methods in the .NET framework use out parameters, and you might be dealing with some legacy code that uses them (some developers, apparently, think out parameters are the greatest idea since sliced bread).

Luckily, calling methods with out parameters is very easy in F#: they are converted to a tuple type automatically. For example, the Math.DivRem method has the following signature:

public static int DivRem(  int a,  int b,  out int result )

which calculates the quotient of two numbers and also returns the remainder in an output parameter (in F#, this is a byref parameter).

Using this method in F# is simple:

let (q,r) = Math.DivRem(n,d)

The out parameter has been automatically converted to the second element of the resulting tuple.

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