Criticism
It has been argued that one should eschew the use of the explicit return statement except at the textual end of a subroutine, considering that, when it is used to "return early", it may suffer from the same sort of readability problems that are claimed to exist for the GOTO statement. For instance, that in later development, a return statement could be overlooked by a developer, and an action which should be performed at the end of a subroutine (e.g.: a trace statement) might not be performed in all cases. Conversely, it can be argued that using the return statement is worthwhile when the alternative is more convoluted code, harming readability. Languages without a return statement, such as standard Pascal don't have this readability problem.
Some early implementations of languages such as the original Pascal and C restricted the types that can be returned by a function (e.g. not supporting record or struct types) to simplify their compilers.
Read more about this topic: Return Statement
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Good criticism is very rare and always precious.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)