Unnecessary 'else' statement [duplicate]

Answer 1

In my opinion, the eclipse check is not very useful. What you should do depends on your program context. Else clauses are for alternatives (either this or that) whereas falling through to a return (no else clause) is more appropriate where you have a number of conditions that may be true and the fallthrough is more of a default reaction that you don't really invoke too often. So you use both in code that conveys meaning and as such checking for presence or absence is not useful.

Answer 2

Some of programmers claim that return in the middle of function is bad practice. Maybe for easy checking at function entry as in your 1st example it is OK and acceptable, but in other cases I would prefer setting result variable as in Jerome response.

Answer 3

I find this form

doLotOfStuff();
if (condition) { 
    return foo; 
}
return bar; 

to be more readable than the one with the else, it's less code and more intuitive if you think about it as a guard statement as in Fowler's Refactoring.

Question about multiple return points.

Answer 4

It was once considered (and probably still be by some) that functions should have one entry point (easy but was relevant when you consider assembly language) and one exit point.

One exit point is nice from a debugging standpoint (as in you can put one watch/break on one line and know you'll go through it) but can lead to some horrific nesting so more often than not readability tends to win out. Which produces the least nesting, the least lines of code and the most readable end result? Ultimately that tends to be far more important than anything else.

For what it's worth the last can be better expressed as:

return condition ? foo : bar;

assuming condition isn't terribly long.

Don't get overly concerned with supposed code "purity". It's an irrelevant distraction. Make things readable and generally be consistent.

Answer 5

Call me a bad boy but I would usually go with:

doLotOfStuff();
return condition ? foo : bar;

Single return statement, very readable.

Answer 6

If I trace the following code, I will notice that the first if-block is an exceptional code block. However, if I add an "else" to that, I may treat both are operational code block.

Also, for the main operational block, there may be some nested blocks. I prefer minimizing the nested level.

public String myMethod(input) {
    if (!validate(input)) {
        return "invalid input";
    }

    operation1();
    if (someCondition) {
        operation2();
    } else {
        operation3();
    }
    operation4();
    operation5();
    return operation6();
}