In this case it is more clear. In the general case you may want to leave the elses off as they can contribute to more nesting and code complexity. For example:
if (error condition) {
do some stuff;
return;
} else {
do stuff;
if (other error condition) {
do some stuff1;
return;
} else {
do some other stuff;
return
}
}
The code below keeps the level of nesting down which reduces code complexity:
if (error condition) {
do some stuff;
return;
}
do stuff;
if (other error condition) {
do some stuff1;
return;
}
do some other stuff;
return;
In your example it is easy either way. But in many cases you would be better off using a lookup table for this sort of thing and reading the values from a file/database. For efficiency in C often this would be coded as an array of structs.
The else does add some clarity in that it makes it clear that the cases are mutually exclusive. However the idiom of returning like you do is obvious to many programmers, so either way the majority will know what you meant.
I can think of an advantage of the elses. If you want to add a new last case, without the elses you might forget to add an if to the currently "Too Hot Condition" if say you wanted to add "Dying" at 120 or something. while with the elses you know that you need the final else to be in front of "Dying" so you will be more likely to think about putting the else if in front of "Too Hot". Also if you just put an else on "Dying" you will get a compile error which forces you to think.
