return in for loop or outside loop

Today, someone attended me to bad use of the return keyword in Java. I had written a simple for loop to validate that something is in an array. Supposing array is an array of length n, this was my code:

for (int i = 0; i < array.length; ++i) {
    if (array[i] == valueToFind) {
        return true;
    }
}
return false;

Now someone told me that this is not very good programming because I use the return statement inside a loop and this would cause garbage collection to malfunction. Therefore, better code would be:

int i = 0;
while (i < array.length && array[i] != valueToFind) {
    ++i;
}
return i != array.length;

The problem is that I can't come up with a proper explenation of why the first for loop isn't a good practice. Can somebody give me an explanation?

java for-loop while-loop

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1 Answer

The code is valid (i.e, will compile and execute) in both cases.

One of my lecturers at Uni told us that it is not desirable to have continue, return statements in any loop - for or while. The reason for this is that when examining the code, it is not not immediately clear whether the full length of the loop will be executed or the return or continue will take effect.

See Why is continue inside a loop a bad idea? for an example.

The key point to keep in mind is that for simple scenarios like this it doesn't (IMO) matter but when you have complex logic determining the return value, the code is 'generally' more readable if you have a single return statement instead of several.

With regards to the Garbage Collection - I have no idea why this would be an issue.

answered 2012-05-29T13:40:33.697

return in for loop or outside loop

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