(MULTIPLE-VALUE (NIL ...) ...)

[Kent M. Pitman <KMP @ MIT-MC>]

By the way, I have carefully watched my code over the last year and in easily
three quarters of the cases where I wanted to ignore arguments, it was because
I in fact only wanted one value back. In Moon's example, I agree that
 (LET (TEM) (MULTIPLE-VALUE (NIL TEM) ...) ...)
is not as nice as
 (MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND (NIL TEM) ... ...)
but I would prefer
 (LET ((TEM (NTH-VALUE 2 ...))) ...)
myself.

On the other hand, I think the point of Benson's note was to point out that
the compiler should be able to handle
 (MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND (IGNORE TEM) ... ...)
if IGNORE isn't used, without needing to make something special about NIL.
I am sympathetic to such an argument.

In any case, in addition to (not in place of) anything that is decided along
these lines, what would people think about adding NTH-VALUE to the list of
available primitives? From my experience, it's frequently just the right thing.
--kmp