FWIW, I prefer your version, simply because my brain effortlessly translates the else into $_[0] != 'ooyah', so it is immediately clear to me that the block gets executed if and only if $_[0] != 'ooyah'. I think I can understand the prof's desire for the "dangling return", but I also think it would require a few more clock cycles for my brain to look at that and be convinced exactly under which conditions 0 would be returned. (At the very least, I'd have to see the return 1 above to know that the return 0 would never get executed if the if was true -- because the if might just have done some work without actually returning...)