Re: Ada and "early return" - opinion/practice question

[John McCabe <john@mccabe.org.uk>]

On Monday, 15 March 2021 at 18:12:38 UTC, Shark8 wrote:
> On Monday, March 15, 2021 at 10:46:39 AM UTC-6, wrote: 
> > I hope this isn't a FAQ (it's hard to find relevant articles) but can someone guide me on the 'normal' treatment in Ada style of what appears to be referred to (by C/C++ programmers) as early-return.
> Exceptions, typically. 

<..snip..>

Thanks for that.

> > I've probably mentioned this before, but it's a long time since I used Ada in anger and I don't remember seeing stuff like that when I did use Ada a lot; does anyone write stuff like that in Ada? 
> > 
> > When I first learnt to program properly it was using Pascal with, as I remember it, only one return from a function being allowed,
> Your memory is correct... for Pascal. 
> Ada has always allowed multiple return statements in a subprogram, with a "return" in a procedure acting as a "jump to the end, do clean-up".

Yes; I knew Ada could, but I checked on the Pascal stuff the other day. Things have changed a bit since then (it was, after all, 1983!) but I became quite indoctrinated by that style and it's been hard to shift away from ;-)

> > so over the years I've mostly looked at positive conditions and indented stuff, pulling the stuff in the middle out into its own procedure or function where appropriate, but you see so many people defending this style in C/C++ that I wonder whether it really is defensible?

> No, it's not defensible... at least IMO.

:-)