Make your code more maintainable: The evils of the Return statement

a-foton » Make your code more maintainable: The evils of the Return statement

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:45:33 GMT

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re: Make your code more maintainable: The evils of the Return statement

Blair — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:29:43 GMT

That massive 1 line return is a perfect example of a code smell. Anyone who sees something like that instantly needs to refactor it so as to be able to understand what it is trying to do.

Also the best 1 liner app I know of is the DSCC hack in 1 line of ugly obfusticated PERL.

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re: Make your code more maintainable: The evils of the Return statement

Steve Bohlen — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:27:19 GMT

This is often made even worse in the cases of a lot of the 'fluent interface' style of coding that seems to be all-the-rage lately and leads one to the 'code-as-sentence' style of developing as in...

return Customer.Add(order).ToAddress(address).WithShipping(shipping).UsingTaxCode(taxCode).InPackaging(box).WithWrappingPaper(true);

This may seem like a good idea, but run-on sentences in code are even worse than such things in written prose. A (small) attempt at improved readability may be often attempted by putting each 'phrase' on a separate line as...

return Customer.Add(order)

.ToAddress(address)

.WithShipping(shipping)

.UsingTaxCode(taxCode)

.InPackaging(box)

.WithWrappingPaper(true);

...but this (code formatting in the source file to address a legibility problem) always seems like an awkward crutch to me.

Return is useful most anywhere when disciplined

Greg — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 06:33:29 GMT

Return statements, when used to avoid nesting are quite useful since they guarantee that nothing in the rest of the function (except finally blocks) will be executed.

function x()

begin

if (validate input parameters fails)

return error value

end if

if (cannot open input file)

return error value 2

end if

....

body of function

return (return value)

end if

That's much much cleaner than overly deep nested if then else blocks.

This works out to:

function X()

begin

if (A) then

return

end if

'guaranteed that condition A is false

if (B) then

return

end if

'guaranteed that condition B is false

....

end

The anti-nesting return when combined with declaring local variables at the innermost scope that they are used can greatly reduce the amount of A) nesting at any given statement in the function and B) greatly reduce the number of NAMES (variables, constants, if conditions, etc) that are in scope for any given line of code.

This will greatly simplify your code.

I've seen lots of ex-vb6 developers not use returns and declare all variables at the top of the function (classic ASP maybe) much to the detriment of increasing complexity of the code.

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