gistfile1.md

Question to pythonistas out there: Is it acceptable to reduce indentation by doing:

if blah:
	# do stuff
	return
# do lots of other stuff

instead of:

if blah:
	# do stuff
else:
	# do lots of other stuff

My personal opinion, which others may disagree with: the first version is fine if and only if it’s at the top of the function

I generally use them to convey slightly different things. The former indicates that "blah" is an unusual case that should be handled separately, while the rest of the code is a more common path. The latter suggests more expected/constrained variation.

i.e. I read the first as "if blah, stop what you would normally do and do this instead"

👍 to @mispy, this is how I tend to write any of my code.