Question

I am working in Ruby and have found the need to have conditional return statements at the end of some/most of my methods.

Here is what I have:

 # <ident-list> -> [ident] <ident-A>
  def ident_list(keys)
    id = nil
    ident_a_node = nil

    ## method hidden

    return IdentifierListNode.new(id, ident_a_node) unless id.nil?
    return nil
  end

Is there a better/cleaner way to go about this with multiple returns?

Answer 1

The last line before the end can be simply

IdentifierListNode.new(id, ident_a_node) unless id.nil?

The last statement executed is the return value of the method. If id is nil, the statement will evaluate as nil, and if not then the new IdentifierListNode instance will be returned.