Fair enough; that example was poorly formatted for that exact code. That approach is far more useful when there is more than just a return in each branch and the program must choose one of several relatively expensive calculations. The formatting I used is better when the expressions are long enough that if (...) { return A } will not fit on one line, but I would collect the conditions into a "table" if they fit. Like:

if    (EXPR1)   { return A }
elsif (EXPR2)   { return B }
elsif (EXPR3)   { return C }
else            { die "unmatched case" }

[download]

That said, while I see the point that else can be unnecessary, I still consider forbidding it to be absurd. I also expect that a future optimizing compiler could make use of an if-elsif chain more easily, although rewriting multiple if (...) { ...; return } into if-elsif is only slightly more complex.

In reply to Re^10: What's the right way to write a method which returns one line at a time from a file? by jcb
in thread What's the right way to write a method which returns one line at a time from a file? by Cody Fendant

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