Beautiful C++: 30 Core Guidelines for Writing Clean, Safe, and Fast Code

Chapter 1.6

NR.2: Don’t insist to have only a single return-statement in a function

Rules evolve

It astonishes me that, 20 percent of the way through the 21st century, people still argue about this. This section of the Core Guidelines is called “Non-rules and myths.” The remarkably prevalent advice that there should be only one return state-ment in a function falls right into this category.

Mandating a single return statement is an old, old rule. It is easy to forget the advances that have been made in programming. I bought my first computer, or rather, my parents did, back in 1981. It was a Sinclair ZX81, powered by an NEC Z80 CPU running at 3.25MHz. The operating system, supplied on 8KB of read-only memory (ROM), included a BASIC interpreter ...