Exactly. Also, for example, when you have lots of "if" clauses, those languages force us to use mutable state (and a variable initialized as null) just to avoi

Exactly. Also, for example, when you have lots of "if" clauses, those languages force us to use mutable state (and a variable initialized as null) just to avoid early exits. But we can avoid both by treating the "if" as an expression, as in Ruby, Lisp, etc, or with the ternary conditional operator... Plus, IMO, there are some situations where early exits are a good idea even in languages derived from C, such as with guard clauses/preconditions. There's a nice discussion about that here with some points I made: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SingleFunctionExitPoint http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SingleFunctionExitPoint (EDIT: I edited a lot but still couldn't make it clear that I agree with you, but I still ended up making points about completely different things, sorry about that, my english skills are lacking sometimes)