Too many return-statements = bad style?

[Andrei]

Marco Aschwanden <PPNTWIMBXFFC <at> spammotel.com> writes:

> I checked the other day  a module of mine with pylint. And for some 
> function it told me, that I was using too many return-statements in my 
> code... there were about 5 or 7 of them in my function.
<snip>

I prefer multiple returns instead of increasingly complex nesting. Obviously
having too many returns (or too much nesting) is showing that you've got a
function which is in need of splitting - I think 5 and especially 7 is a lot,
but it depends on the function. I also like having the conditions such, that the
short code is at the top of the if-else clause, while some programming
guidelines claim you should write the most common cause first (even if that's
considerably longer than the uncommon one).

Yours,

Andrei