Question

I am sorry for posting a pretty redundant question. I was wondering if it was really necessary to use else {} if the code just stops or returns a value. In theory, is it really necessary to put else{} in these scenarios?

function check() {
    if($something == "something") {
        exit;
    }
    echo "hello";
}

Or

function check() {
    if($something == "something") {
        return true;
    }
    echo "hello";
}

The reason I posted this was because I saw some “professional” code which I guess they thought it looked “good.”

Answer 1

Syntactically, it’s perfectly fine.

It’s also a very common pattern to use, and IMHO, makes code more readable.

For the sake of code clarity/clean coding, if you’re returning a boolean you should return a boolean even if the if() doesn’t match.

function check() {
    if($something == "something") {
        return true;
    }
    return false;
}