In Support Of Multiple Return Values

Lately I've been working on a gambling app for a client (fun stuff!) and I find myself making pretty heavy use of multiple return values. Here's an example:

 (define (deal deck count)
   ...
   (values the-dealt-cards the-updated-deck))

In this case, I've got a nice and functional interface for dealing cards - send in a deck and the number of cards I want dealt and get back the cards and the updated deck. This makes for plenty of let-values but I'm not finding them too clunky. For example:

  (define (play ...)
   (let-values ([(player1 deck) (deal deck 5)])
     (let-values ([player2 deck) (deal deck 5)])
       ;; player 1 & 2 both have 5 cards and our deck has 10 fewer cards
       ...)))

The multiple values approach seems to work well here, as it avoids me having to come up with a structure to describe the result or use a list. In either case, I don't have to worry about destructuring the results later on.

What do you think? Should I be considering an alternate approach than values?

I was going to lament the lack of multiple return values in other languages, but, PHP kinda sorta handles it somewhat gracefully. You can say:

  function deal($deck, $count) {
    ...magic...
    return array($the_cards, $the_updated_deck);
  }

  list($cards, $deck) = deal($deck, 10);

Not great, but at least list makes it easy to get a hold of the multiple values.

I'm not sure I'd want to try this in Java though...