Too many return-statements = bad style?

[Roy Smith]

Marco Aschwanden <PPNTWIMBXFFC at spammotel.com> wrote:
> Through books I learned, that there should be only 1 return statement in a 
> function. This makes for clear code - they said. I tried to stick to this 
> principle for a very long time... ending up with deeper and deeper nested 
> if-then-else-clauses and hided code-sections with clever if-then-clauses 
> when the return value was already clear or when the code was not eligible 
> for this specific return value:

You're talking about "Single Entry, Single Exit".  It was a style of 
coding that used to be popular.  I hate it, for exactly the reasons you 
state above.  http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SingleFunctionExitPoint has some 
interesting things to say on that.

I even go so far as to intentionally write multiple-exit functions 
during refactoring because they are often a neat way to clean up messy 
logic.  Let's say I've got:

for i in list:
   if blah:
      if i == 4:
         foo = 1
      else:
         foo = 2
   else:
      foo = 3

that's a mess to read (especially if it's further embedded inside some 
other complex logic).  What I'll do is force that little bit of uglyness 
down into a multi-return function:

def getFoo (i):
   if blah:
      if i == 4:
         return 1
      else:
         return 2
   return 3

and then just write in my main-line code:

for i in list:
   foo = getFoo (i)