Actual code i have seen with my own eyes. (Not in F-35 code)
Its a way to avoid removing an unused parameter from a method. Unused parameters are disallowed, but this is fine?
I am sceptical that these coding standards make for good code!
Notably this document is from 2005. So that's after C++ was standardized but before their second bite of that particular cherry and twenty years before its author, Bjarne Stroustrup suddenly decides after years of insisting that C++ dialects are a terrible idea and will never be endorsed by the language committee, that in fact dialects (now named "profiles") are the magic ingredient to fix the festering problems with the language.
While Laurie's video is fun, I too am sceptical about the value of style guides, which is what these are. "TABS shall be avoided" or "Letters in function names shall be lowercase" isn't because somebody's aeroplane fell out of the sky - it's due to using a style Bjarne doesn't like.
I do early returns in code I write, but ONLY because everybody seems to do it. I prefer stuff to be in predictable places: variables at the top, return at the end. Simpler? Delphi/Pascal style.
For example of the rule, a function might allocate, do something and then de-allocate again at the end of the block. A second exit point makes it easy to miss that de-allocation, and so introduce memory leaks that only happen sometimes. The code is harder to reason about and the bugs harder to find.
source:
> A problem with early exit is that cleanup statements might not be executed. ... Cleanup must be done at each return site, which is brittle and can easily result in bugs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_programming#Early_r...
About 90% of us will now be thinking "but that issue doesn't apply to me at all in $ModernLang. We have GC, using (x) {} blocks, try-finally, or we have deterministic finalisation, etc."
And they're correct. In most modern languages it's fine. The "no early returns" rule does not apply to Java, TypeScript, C#, Rust, Python, etc. Because these languages specifically made early return habitable.
The meta-rule is that some rules persist past the point when they were useful. Understand what a rule is for and then you can say when it applies at all. Rules without reasons make this harder. Some rules have lasted: we typically don't use goto at all any more, just structured wrappers of it such as if-else and foreach
Early return is perfectly manageable in C as long as you aren't paranoid about function inlining. You just have a wrapper that does unconditional setup, passes the acquired resources to a worker, and unconditionally cleans up. Then the worker can return whenever it likes, and you don't need any gotos either.
Right, so you allow early return only in functions that do not have any setup and clean-up - where it's safe. Something like "pure" functions. And you describe a way to extract such functions from others.