hstools: returning an array from a function

here's my problem - i have a prepared select statement that will return any number of rows. i have a function defined that opens the cursor and does a fetch all into a variable(which gives an array if more than one row found). from that function, i want to return the array, but it doesn't seem to work. if i remember correctly from class, there seems to be some problems with the way that hstools passes variables between function. can anyone enlighten me? i was taught a long time ago that global variables are a bad thing, so i would really like for the function to return the array instead of using a global variable to hold the array.