Avoid Else, Return Early (2013)

Re:Avoid Else, Return Early (2013) by lamg on Monday March 26, 2018 @11:37AM (#16679653)

Certainly is hard to read nested code, but returning earlier makes it harder because now our mind has to construct the execution path instead of reading it. What I usually do is writing the body in a new procedure. Dijkstra designed a language with no return statement with a very simple semantics made for proving the program behaves exactly as its specification mandates. Niklaus Wirth designed Oberon with no return statement. Currently I write Go code only using return at the end of the procedure, my code is easy to follow and has fewer errors than before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarded_Command_Language https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/ProjectOberon/index.h...

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Re:Avoid Else, Return Early (2013) by cryptonector on Monday March 26, 2018 @12:26PM (#16680062)

Golang is not comparable, as you get to leave failures not handled explicitly because its goto-fail scheme. I mean, that's a very nice feature of Go, but not comparable.

The danger with early returns is failure to handle all cleanup. This is really a failure of many programming languages. Golang gets this right. But even so, I'd rather have early returns (or early goto-fails) than ever deeper if/else ladders.

Another option that works very well is this:

    ret = thing1(...);
    if (ret == 0)
        ret = thing2(...);
    if (ret == 0)
        ret = thing3(...);
    if (ret)
        <handle failure>;
    return ret;

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