alt Hacker NewsIs it just me that doesnt like automatically returning the last statement in functions? It makes it hard to see where a function returns, and I dont see how you would do a guard clause at the start of a function without having the entire rest of the function in an else block
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I remember really bumping up against this learning OCaml in college after having experienced oodles of imperative programming.
I understand the sort of philosophy and ergonomics of not having an early return, but it really does hurt certain kinds of code that otherwise would be more readable
I think it is much more obvious than being able to return from anywhere in a function. If the last expression is a match, I know every match body must return the same type. if the last is a (cond ...) I know ever cond branch must return a value. I vastly prefer that.
If it's inconsistently applied, yes.
In most functional languages however you can view the end of any statement/expression as a return/assign which makes it very easy and trivial to assign anything to variables, or split anything into function calls.
I suspect the idea would be to use `match` instead of an imperative `if`. There's an example here:
https://github.com/kablorp/blorp/blob/main/benchmarks/blorp/...
Then again, there's really not too many examples of early return guards, but I did manage to find one where the body is stuffed in an `else`:
https://github.com/kablorp/blorp/blob/main/benchmarks/blorp/...
It does make me think that the usual types of guards might typically happen higher up (handled by the caller) or hidden with safe / monadic type operators that simply pass through rather than bailing out, so to speak.