On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:52:00 -0400, Mark Mielke <mark@mark.mielke.cc> wrote: > First, it should be understood by all that this question is really about > STYLE - not about universal readability. There are different answers, > and there are different opinions. People who come from a LISP background > may find it easier to read one style than people from a C background. > Therefore, for anybody to claim that one is universally easier to read > than another is FALSE. It can only be easier to read for a section of > the population. As to which section of the population is bigger? ... > > Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote: > > * Mark Mielke <mark@mark.mielke.cc> [2008-06-23 01:10]: > > > >> If your suggestion is that "return" improves readability, I > >> disagree that the addition of "return" will universally improve > >> the ability for a person to read the code. > >> > > > > As long as you have the discipline to always, *always* write a > > bare `return;` in functions that are meant not to return a value, > > and the maintenance programmer who comes after knows of your > > discipline in that matter, then using `return` when you do mean > > to return a value is not necessary. > > > > There are alternatives. For example, most people end their modules with > "1;" effectively saying "return 1;". In my case, I have had functions > such as you describe with: > > sub NAME > { > ... lots of code ... > > undef; > } What if the function can return a list or a scalar? "return" handles that automatically, undef does not; BTW I agree with both worlds. In some cases it should suffice to use the last value, in some cases one should use return for clarity -- H.Merijn Brand Amsterdam Perl Mongers http://amsterdam.pm.org/ using & porting perl 5.6.2, 5.8.x, 5.10.x, 5.11.x on HP-UX 10.20, 11.00, 11.11, 11.23, and 11.31, SuSE 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3, AIX 5.2, and Cygwin. http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/ http://www.test-smoke.org/ http://qa.perl.org http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/Thread Previous | Thread Next