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Comment by optimuspaul | Hacker News Reader

I was going to pop in to say that. also going to add that I hate implicit things like this. messes with my brain, how hard is it to just add the return keyword? saving a few keystrokes hardly seems worth the increased cognitive cost to others.

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In most languages that have implicit returns (that I’m aware of), the languages are also expression-oriented. For example, in Rust, if/else is actually an expression and you can use the result:

    let result = if foo > 5 {
        "Big foo"
    } else {
        "Small foo"
    };

Implicit returns are just an extension of this (it’s really just “semicolons create statements; if you don’t have a semicolon, that’s the final value of the block”). The explicit return is an actual statement that returns early.

IME the holistic design works pretty well, and I think you can glue together expressions much more naturally this way. The implicit return on itself would be much more annoying IMO.

“Implicit return” is basically a misnomer; there’s no language that I’m aware of that implicitly returns early. They’re all expression oriented and act like this.

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