[Oberon] Multiple RETURN in a procedure

[Joerg]

Wojtek

Conceptionally, a procedure and a function are two different things. A procedure is a task doing something (steering a motor or drawing a circle), a function calculates a value.
In previous Oberons a function was just a procedure with some RETURN statements. There was no syntactic enforcement of having one RETURN at all. The compiler had to count whether you included at least one RETURN statement. If you wanted to spot what the function returns, you had to find all RETURNs and hopefully you didn’t overread one..
In Oberon-07 the different concepts of procedures and function differ also in syntax, the RETURN is not a statement anymore it is the last reserved word before the end of the function.
This way it is educationally easier to bring across the different concepts, your code is no „spaghetti code“ anymore (RETURN statements were hidden GOTOs, even from within nested loops)

Personally, I find this a little less cluttered
PROCEDURE min(min,x: INTEGER): INTEGER;
BEGIN IF x < min THEN min := x END
RETURN min END min;

br
Jörg

> Am 23.10.2022 um 06:05 schrieb Skulski, Wojciech <skulski at pas.rochester.edu>:
> 
> I know this is a recurring topic, but still... what is so sinister about multiple RETURN statements? The following Oberon procedure was elegantly coded with two RETURNs. Could you please remind me why multiple RETURNs were so wrong that they are now forbidden? What is the overwhelming benefit of disallowing multiple RETURNs, that is justifying breaking perfectly valid code? 
> 
> Please do not try to convince me that rewriting is easy. Yes, it is easy to rewrite this little piece. But I am now facing three thousand lines of my Oberon-2 library. It would be so nice if stylistic improvements were not introduced to the language, unless truly necessary. Is this one truly necessary, and why?
> 
> PROCEDURE min (x,y: INTEGER) : INTEGER;
> BEGIN IF x < y THEN RETURN (x) ELSE RETURN (y) END END min;
> 
> Thanks,
> Wojtek
> 
> 
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