There's a "return" statement in nearly every procedural programming language supporting subroutines. It causes a subroutine to be stopped and to return a certain value to the caller.

sub foo { return 1 };
$var = foo(); #$var is 1
sub bar {
    print "AAA";
    return 1;
    print "BBB"; #will never happen, for 'return' has
     # stopped this sub
}
$var = bar();
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The breaking character of return is not present in all languages, i know ugly Pascal doesn't have a return statement and you cannot exit a sub from the middle.

These are the very basics, try a good book to start!

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