On 8/08/2013, at 2:56 AM, Donn Cave wrote:
The RFC822 headers of your email suggest that you use a Macintosh computer, so apart from the apparently disputable question of whether you're familiar with English, you have the same online dictionary as mine.
My department has an electronic subscription to the OED.
Second definition: "give, put, or send (something) back to a place or person", with examples "she returned his kiss", usage from tennis and football, verdicts, etc. Third definition: "yield or make a profit", fourth (re)elect a person or party. "Return" is all about providing a value, in English.
Check the OED. Most of its meaning are about _turning back_, _resuming_, _reverting_. Yielding or making a profit is not at all about "providing a value", but about money going out AND COMING BACK. It's the coming back part that makes it a "return". "value" occurs twice in OED 'return, v.1", in neither case referring to providing a value. OED "re-turn, v.2" has "value" once, again not referring to providing a value (in fact, to detecting possible theft). OED "return, n" has "the fact or an instance of bringing value in exchange for effort or investment", where the salient part is "IN EXCHANGE FOR": effort going out, value COMING BACK. There are two other similar senses, out of I don't know how many senses (because I lost count after 80). A "return" can be "a reply, answer or retort" (as in the Fool's "Marry, it was a sharp retort" in one of the Discworld novels, when an alchemist's vessel exploded), "a summary of a [cricket] play's bowling or batting performance", "a response to a demand", "a wing or side of a building", or "a side street", among many other things. In all of the senses, the underlying idea is not provision of a value, but going, turning, or bending back.
When a term like "return" is used in a computer programming language in a sense that confounds any prior expectation based on English or other programming languages, that's the opposite of "intuitive".
OK, so when in the past someone met "RETURN" in their second programming language, what had their experience taught them to expect? ISO/IEC 1989:20xx CD 1.2 (E) 14.9.32 RETURN statement The RETURN statement obtains either sorted records from the final phase of a sort operation or merged records during a merge operation. 14.9.32.1 General format RETURN file-name-1 RECORD [ INTO identifier-1 ] AT END imperative-statement-1 [ NOT AT END imperative-statement-2 ] [ END-RETURN ] This is a somewhat more elaborate form of a statement which has been present in COBOL since at least 1974 and probably longer. The latest estimate I've seen is that four thousand million lines of new COBOL are added every year. Operationally, the COBOL RETURN statement is more like a READ than anything else.