At 3:25 PM +0100 6/29/08, Colin Guthrie wrote:
Dotan Cohen wrote:
Why not? I do this often, but I am not a professional programmer. I
find this to be very useful.
Found another opinion/article about this. I remember reading this
one a while back:
http://whatimean.wordpress.com/2007/02/08/multiple-return-points-are-bad/
Like I said before, I don't personally subscribe to this point of
view, but it makes for interesting reading :D
Whenever possible, I try to keep to a single return in my functions.
For me it usually makes my life easier.
However, there are times that if one insists on keeping to a single
return doctrine, then the code can become very difficult to read
because of additional code to maintain the requirement.
I found an excellent example of this in DOM Scripting (page 99) by
Keith where he takes a sea of curly braces and reduces them down a
few false returns that appear immediately at the beginning of the
function.
So, in this case I clearly support multiple returns provided that
they appear in a logical and obvious location (i.e., in the front of
the function).
Having multiple returns spread throughout a function is not conducive
to providing the reader with easy comprehension as to what the
function is doing (i.e., readability) -- which is the main reason for
all of this concern anyway.
When you can easily understand what your function is doing by
inspection, then you are doing something right.
Cheers,
tedd
PS: Nice try on the starting another thread. :-)
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