I could give an example but I need to think of one that answers what you're addressing. I suspect that my question was so basic that it threw people off lol.
Basically, I just need my functions to return the variable I want. It was so common for the last statement in my functions to return the result I was looking for that I was just lost as to how to make my function return something that wasn't the last returned item. Maybe a bad example: But imagine you're processing a list of numbers and trying to find the highest number. After the highest number is found each item comparison then returns nil... so in that case the function would then return nil. An ugly way to deal with this would be storing that highest number in a global variable... but why. I found out that if I store the value in a local variable, then call it with either "setq" or "eval" in the last statement of the function (after the loop), I would be able to get the function to return the item I wanted... but it felt like an extra unnecessary step (and I never see anyone else doing it so suspected it's weird).