I asked a question that ended up having two separate parts, and managed to obtain (with the subsequent help of Wolfram Technical Support) answers to both: Combining pure functions containing compound expressions
In the interests of helping this site be a readily-searchable resource, I think it makes sense to divide this question (and corresponding answers) into two parts, titled as follows:
(1) Keeping display ordering same as input ordering
(2) Obtaining non-null output from intermediate parts of a compound expression
That way someone searching for either the first or second topics can more directly find each.
Notes: (1) is not quite a duplicate of Changing the display ordering of orderless functions? because the OP was looking for a function that would dictate the display order, while I was looking for a simpler approach that merely displayed the output in the same order that I typed it. [So the function would just act to protect the display order, rather than specify it.]
And (2) is not a duplicate of Compound Statements and returning earlier results in () parentheses , since there the OP was looking to Print the results (which displays the results, but has Null content), while I want to actually get the results (such that I could assign them to variables).
Any objections to my doing that?
