dustmop wrote:"single return only" is a pretty outdated concept
I don't think much of "one size fits all" rules, but I don't think it's an outdated principle at all. I don't think tepples was saying that, either-- one of the most prominent responses in that article was talking about one of Dijkstra's old screeds, but there are other responses in it that show applications where it's a very good idea to do it.
I listed one practical reason to do it in my response. I actually tend to avoid single-line "if" statements for the same reason: if your debugger has breakpoints per-line, you can't break on it otherwise, so I'd rather waste some whitespace pre-emptively than have to stop running and recompile to debug.
It's not terribly useful to look at an example like this and decide that one is better than the other. It really does depend on the specific application, IMO. Ideas like "never use goto" and "single entry single exit" aren't wrong because they're old, they're wrong because they're being held up as absolutes, instead of as guidelines to help with critical evaluation of your code.