Brendan Eich even said as much in the comments of the bug: he'd rather be programming in a pure, expression-based manner too, but C++ is not Ocaml. And for a lot of C++ code, no-else-after-return works reasonably well.

If I have a function with multiple conditions that cause me to return error / false / nil, I'd rather not have to nest them all in a series of if/then/else statements nor combine them into a single more-complicated if condition. I'd rather write them each as separate if-and-returns, followed by the real meat of the function.

function updatePlayers{

  if (charList is empty)
     return false;

  if (play is paused)
     return false;

  if (char is frozen)
     return false;

  //do stuff here
  return true;

I think this better spells out the "error" conditions.

  if (a < b)
    return a
  return b

  if (a < b)
    return a
  else
    return b

  return ( (a < b) ? a : b)

I think the style guide is being silly, and there is no simple rule that says "always use an else" or "never use an else". I'd see "Avoid unnecessary indentation" as a better rule.

I find short-cut "return" statements frustrating for many reasons. For example, there's a risk that proper cleanup will not always happen, it is harder to see state and program flow when debugging, and it's no longer simple to make every-case changes by adding things to the end of the function. They're really just another type of "goto".

The only "advantages" I can think of are saving a few keystrokes, and having slightly better performance by not using a variable for the return value. In my experience, neither of those things has ever mattered.

In other words, I'd do this:

  <type> result = defaultValue;
  if (condition)
  {
    result = val1;
  }
  else
  {
    result = val2;
  }
  return result;

As for being harder to debug... it depends. Again, if you MUST do manual resource deallocation, then I can see your case. Having duplicated cleanup code inside the control flow gets old fast. But if you've got exceptions, then such a rule leads very quickly to unnecessarily deep, convoluted control structures. I've flattened many such structures by a) factoring chunks out to separate functions and b) returning early when appropriate.

It is very common for a function/method to either throw an exception or return a default value based on some parameter. In these cases, it's pound-you-in-the-face clear to have a list of "if(check) return whatever;" clauses at the top. If you do this before resource allocation, you don't even need to worry about cleanup. This feels like a much "purer" way to write a function to me, almost like applying pattern matching before falling back to imperative mode.

Exceptions act like early returns themselves, but I will use them for truly exceptional cases (only). In other words, if a function can return 3 values, I consider those the "normal" cases that should weave through to the end of the function; if the function runs out of memory, I think that's an exceptional case that can return immediately.

I opt for one return per exit type. For example:

* If I have a success/failure function, I will have "return (0);" and "return (1);" statements.

* If I have a pointer-or-fail function (e.g., an object constructor), I will have "return (r);" and "return (NULL);" statements.

* If I have a true/false/fail function (e.g., check if a file exists; return 1 if it exists, return 0 if it doesn't exist, and return -1 if something failed such that we couldn't figure out if the file exists), I will have "return (0);", "return (1);", and "return (-1);" statements.

In trivial functions, this tends to make my code somewhat more verbose than necessary; but I've found that sticking to this coding style dramatically reduces the odds of me making mistakes when I come back to code later and modify it, since different exit types usually require different cleanup code.

Without early return, you wind up with multiple-nested if statements that make the code absolutely unreadable. Early return is almost always used as the error path -- if you need to perform cleanup, then instead of returning, use goto to jump to a single end-of-function cleanup handler.

There's nothing wrong with using goto for this purpose, and it means I can actually read -- at a glance -- code that requires more than a few preconditions at the start of the function.

When making that split, it is also helpful to have relevant cleanup code nearby: odds are everything is already in the inner block, instead of having to remove extra code at the end of the function.

That assumes that all of the cleanup is the same and that all of the relevant information that is available at the subroutine's top level.

Most of the people who code this way that I've met don't do it b/c they're trying to be 'pure.' Most of them say it was coding standard some manager mentioned somewhere else long ago and now they just do it w/o thinking.

If you find this discussion interesting you're probably stuck with codebases with overly long functions. My commiserations.

That's the main reason why I religiously put open and close braces on even the smallest if/else blocks as it dramatically improves the readability of the code.

If the mozilla code style specified that you have to use braces no matter what then they wouldn't be having this problem.

Of course, I'm probably arguing with hackers who prefer to use constructs like 'return (a > b ? a : b)' rather than write readable code.

This is coming from someone who likes to put spaces after and before parentheses so it makes it easier to figure out what's going on.

e.g. if ( ( y > x ) || ( x < 10 ) ) - this makes things easier to read (for me) when you start to get a hell of a lot of nesting going.

I like spacing my parens too, but what you wrote isn't as readable to me as:

  ( (y > x) || (x < 10) )

I also like multiline expressions:

  if (  (x == 10) ||
        (y == 10) ||
        (x > y) )
  {
    .....
  }

With statements, the first token on the line tells you what it's doing and the indentation tells you about its relationship to statement on the previous line. Why not do something similar for multi-line expressions?

This sort of thing really doesn't matter much one way or another. Do what the rest of the codebase is doing, and move on with your life. If you're writing your own code, do what you feel like doing.

I now find myself using 'cond' almost exclusively over 'if'.

And there is a little misunderstanding propagated: "Even in a language like C/C++ you can do something approaching functional programming by avoiding statements". I don't think so.