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    Most of the people who like functions and procedures to have single entry and exit points grew up on Pascal. Pascal was not the first language that I learned, but it had a profound impact on how I structure code to this day. People always comment on how easy it is to read my Java code. That's because I avoid multiple exits points as well as intermixing declarations with code. I try my best to declare every local variable used in a method at the top of the method. This practice avoids code ramble by forcing me to keep methods succinct. Commented Mar 15, 2011 at 15:37
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    Pascal also had nested functions. Just sayin'... Commented Mar 15, 2011 at 17:32
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    From what I remember, back in the day, the main reason that people didn't like multiple return statements in functions was because debuggers didn't handle them properly. It was a real pain to set a breakpoint at the end of a function but you never hit it because of an earlier return statement. For every compiler I use nowadays that is no longer an issue. Commented Mar 15, 2011 at 19:16
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    @bit-twiddler: I'm not so sure about that. I'm still using Pascal today, and I generally regard "single entry single exit," or at least the single-exit part of it, as cargo cult programming. I just consider Break, Continue and Exit as tools in my toolbox; I use them where it makes the code easier to follow, and don't use them where it would make things harder to read. Commented Mar 15, 2011 at 21:32
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    Many have agreed that the point is to make reading the code or reasoning about it easier. When reading code, though, I usually don't follow a top-bottom pattern. I'm trying to understand something about it and not everything about it. So, if I see a while (a < 0) {...} and I think I could jump to the end of the block and expect to a >=0 to hold. A break could break that expectation. Commented Jul 13, 2016 at 21:23