There is a point between Multiple & early return vs. One last return, which
is Efficiency.
Imagine you have a code which makes lots of things. What is better in time?
If you have early returns, your script will only do the operations it has
to, nothing more than it has to do.
If you have your data, but still keep calculating some other operations you
don't need for this data (but maybe for another), and then you return, you
are losing precious time of execution.
And making things such as the showed above (for example):
void foo(int bar)
{
int rv;
if (bar)
rv = 1;
else
rv = 0;
return rv;
}
is not that good. Nor even the solution:
function foo($bar)
{
if ($bar)
return true;
return false;
}
Think, that if you have something like $bar (a boolean variable), and if it
is true, you return true, it is best to do this, is better, faster, and if
the expression is simple is legible.
function foo($bar)
{
return $bar
}
Notice that if $bar is true, foo will return true. If $bar is false, foo
will return False. And what if I want to return false if $bar is true and
viceversa?
Simple as this:
function foo($bar)
{
return !$bar;
}
Notice the "!" symbol. Of course, it also is valid for expressions. What if
have a function which returns true if I have a number even and the another
is uneven? Should look like this
function foo($even_number,$uneven_number)
{
return even($even_number) && uneven($uneven_number);
}
And it works and it's simple. Supposing even( ) and uneven( ) functions
return a boolean value y the variable passed is even and uneven.
Cheers
On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 17:35, tedd <tedd.sperling@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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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