Question

Okay, this is a simple question, but I’d like some oppinions on the correct practice here. I am not looking at this for performance concerns, because CPU’s are so powerful that this wouldn’t make any perceivable difference unless called without a looping contruct with thousands of iterations. I just want views on what is the accepted standard.

I have a method that bascially just does a check returns a boolean. However, there are numerous ways to implement this.

Here is how I would normally implement this.

    public bool CanUndo()
    {
        if (_nCurrentUndoIndex > 0)
            return true;
        else
            return false;
    }

However, it is often frowned upon to return from the middle of a method. The only time I normally do this is when performing a check on a form submission like this.

        if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(firstName.Text))
        {
            MessageBox.Show("Please enter a first name", "Incomplete");
            return;
        }

I consider that acceptable.

Back to the undo question, an alternative way to code it would be this.

    public bool CanUndo()
    {
        bool returnVal;
        if (_nCurrentUndoIndex > 0)
            returnVal = true;
        else
            returnVal = false;
        return returnVal;
    }

This however unncessarily allocates a variable and is more verbose code. Another option would be.

    public bool CanUndo()
    {
        bool returnVal = false;
        if (_nCurrentUndoIndex > 0)
            returnVal = true;
        return returnVal;
    }

This is more streamlined as it gets rid of the else. However, if the value is true is makes an unneccesary assignment by initializing it to false.

Answer 1

public bool CanUndo () {
    return _nCurrentUndoIndex > 0;
}

Personally I don’t have a problem with returning from the middle of a method. It complicates cleanup code for C functions but with RAII that argument disappears.

I prefer to exit as soon as is suitable otherwise you get

if (x) {
   if (y) {
       if (z) {
          complete
       }
   }
}

rather than

if (!x)
    return

if (!y)
    return

if (!z)
    return

complete

This way you avoid nesting, wide lines (horizontal screen space is expensive, vertical space is cheap) and you always know that if you’re still in a function then you’re not in an error path. Code which works well with this design also works well with exceptions, which is very important.