Why is there no global function in wordpress to return the output of any function call?

We have template tags and some functions that start with get. Sometimes it would be just nice in themes to do like:

$title = the_title();

to use the html later on. This is just a simplified example, naturally there is some function like get_the_title(); But that works for that function only.

I’m wondering why there is no such function like this:

function get_output() {
    $args     = func_get_args();
    $callback = array_shift($args);
    ob_start();
    call_user_func_array($callback, $args);
    return ob_get_clean();
}

That could convert any function that has output into a returning function:

$title = get_output('the_title');

Any idea why about that has never been thought about? Every theme author or hacker can make use of such, right?

In direct response to the question, WordPress does not include a function for this partly because it does not specifically apply to WordPress functionality. I.e. it’s a PHP (potential) problem, not WordPress.

Also, I wouldn’t say it’s WordPress’ responsibility to provide workarounds for plugins etc that don’t provide an function to return data (which is against the general WordPress style).