title: What's the correct term for returning something as an out parameter?
body: <p>I hope this question is on topic.</p>
  
  <p>I was doing  code review and stumbled upon the following function:</p>
  
  <pre><code>bool SomeFunc(std::string&amp; o_xxx, char&amp; o_yyy);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This function is used to retrieve the values of <code>xxx</code> and <code>yyy</code> of some class by means of out parameters.</p>
  
  <p>The comments (which are later used for auto-documentation) say:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>... this function returns by reference the [xxx] and [yyy]...</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Obviously the function returns a boolean value indicating success or failure. So the sentence above need to be rephrased. But how? What's the correct term (if any) for returning something, as it were, by means of an out parameter, or, in other words, populating an argument passed by reference?</p>
  
  <p>The question is tagged language agnostic, because it's not C++ specific. But it's also tagged C++ because the example is in C++.</p>