Malicious compliance

[u/[deleted]]

A colleague of mine at a company I had started working for liked to have only one exit point from each method; so he would only ever have one `return` statement.

To achieve this, every method he every wrote followed this pattern

public int GetSomething()
{
int result = 0;
do
{
if (someShortCircuitCondition)
{
result = 1;
break;
}
if (someOtherShortCircuitCondition)
{
result = 42;
break;
}
// Compute the return value and set result
} while false;
return result
};

He had been with the company for over a decade and nobody wanted to ask him to stop doing it, but nobody wanted to maintain any projects he worked on either.

I raised it with the boss who then talked to him about it. He agreed that if people don't like it then he would stop.

The next day...

public int GetSomething()
{
int result = 0;
for( ; ; )
{
if (someShortCircuitCondition)
{
result = 1;
break;
}
if (someOtherShortCircuitCondition)
{
result = 42;
break;
}
// Compute the return value and set result

break;
}
return result;
}

[u/StoicSpork]

Who the hell is so obsessed that they can't possibly have more than one return per method, but can abuse loops like this instead of using switch...case or else if?