suggest using explicit return in style guide #29727
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fredrikekre
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doc/src/manual/style-guide.md
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| function h!(x) | ||
| fill!(x, compute(x)) | ||
| modify!(x) | ||
| return nothing |
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maybe just return or nothing? explicitly stating the default is a bit excessive
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Agreed on just return.
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is there a convention that mutating functions should return the input, like push!?
| Explicit `return` on an expression makes it clear that the expression is intended to be returned and | ||
| is not only used for its side effect. It also makes it possible to locally see that a certain sub-expression | ||
| in a larger expression is returned while for an implicit return value one needs to analyze the whole outer expression. | ||
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Maybe also mention that it can help the program to run faster if it was returning an unintentional value (when it only needs to return nothing)?
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This is a very good point but I think it is quite separate --- whether to end a function with x or return x is just a style choice, but making sure to return nothing when you don't mean to return a value is more significant.
| function h!(x) | ||
| fill!(x, compute(x)) | ||
| modify!(x) | ||
| return |
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Can we find an example that doesn't run counter to other suggestions in this file?
It is typical for such functions to also return the modified array for convenience.
I'm not the biggest fan of the first example either as I try to only use one return point if possible. That's not a documented guideline, though.
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Agreed on the first point.
Regarding one return point, I personally think early return is much better. There is seldom need to do a bunch of cleanup in Julia so any advantage of having only one return point seems much reduced compared to e.g. C. If your comment was just about the specific example, I just took the simplest I could figure out, of course, you would typically just write the whole thing there as f(x) = x > 2 ? "a" : "b". Can maybe come up with something better.
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Oh I love early returns (guard clauses) at the top of a function, too, but I'll write those as short-circuits. I don't love returns tucked away in the complicated portion of an algorithm if I can help it. In a short example though it's not clear which is which. What you have is just fine.
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Triage: Should be reworded but something along those lines is positive. |
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meh |
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