Question

The Pocoo style guide advises to use break, continue and return statements to avoid deeply nested code. How would you do that?

Answer 1

A simple example would be that instead of this:

for item in seq:
    if someCondition:
       # Here is our code block
       if blah:
           more.stuff()

you can do this

for item in seq:
    if not someCondition:
       continue
   # Now our code block is here
   if blah:
       more.stuff()

Note that the latter saves an indentation level. Obviously you can’t always do this, but in some cases it improves readability to handle “if X then stop right away” conditions at the beginning, instead of having to wrap a large stretch of code in an if block.