In the Eiffel user discussion group , Ian Joyner recently asked:
A lot of people are now using Result as a variable name for the
return value in many languages. I believe this first came from
Eiffel, but can’t find proof. Or was it adopted from an earlier
language? Proof I cannot offer, but certainly my recollection is
that the mechanism was an original design and not based on any
previous language. (Many of Eiffel’s mechanisms were inspired by
other languages, which I have always acknowledged as precisely
as I could, but this is not one of them. If there is any earlier
language with this convention — in which case a reader will
certainly tell me — I was and so far am not aware of it.) The
competing conventions are a return instruction, as in C and
languages based on it (C++, Java, C#), and Fortran’s practice,
also used in Pascal, of using the function name as a variable
within the function body. Neither is satisfactory. The return
instruction suffers from two deficiencies: - It is an extreme
form of goto, ju