Return type polymorphism in C-like languages

Question

Why don\'t we see C-like languages that allow for callables with polymorphism in the return type? I could see how the additional type inference would be a hurdle, but we hav

Answer 1

i would love to see this feature in some language, not only so that function foo could return a double or an int or a string, but also so that foo could return a structure or objects of different classes. Disambiguating calls would be fairly trivial - if the call is ambiguous, require a cast to select the return type desired. Example:

string s = foo();    //foo returns a string
double x = foo();    //foo returns a double
int i = foo();       //foo returns an integer
float f = (float)(int)foo();    //call the int foo and convert to float

in addition

Animal a = fooFactory();    //fooFactory returns an Animal
Plant p = fooFactory();     //foofactory returns a Plant

these situations do not come up very often, but when they do the workaround is often fairly ugly...