[FIXED] What is the real benefit of obeying R1705 in pylint? Is the code really safer?

Issue

With pylint, I know that R1705 warning gets triggered when you put a 'return' inside an 'else'.

This is the warning: R1705: Unnecessary "else" after "return" (no-else-return)

This is what the docs says about it:

Unnecessary “else” after “return” Used in order to highlight an unnecessary block of code following an if containing a return statement. As such, it will warn when it encounters an else following a chain of ifs, all of them containing a return statement.

A snippet of code that will trigger R1705:

if CONDITION1:
   return something1
else:
   return something2

The desired fix to shut down the warning:

if CONDITION1:
   return something1
return something2

Is it really needed to obey this? What's the benefit? I mean I understand that after returning something from a function there is no way to come back and read further code.

But I find it way more organized to use 'else'.

Solution

If you're trying to conform to Mozilla Coding Style or similar then R1705 makes sense. Quoting:

Don't put an else right after a return (or a break). Delete the else, it's unnecessary and increases indentation level.

Otherwise, you might prefer to disable that warning. Better still, consider switching to flake8, which tends to stay pretty silent if you've been writing sensible code.

Outside of the Mozilla community, most folks would rather see simple parallel functional clauses handled with an else, like this:

def max(a, b):
    if a > b:
        return a
    else:
        return b

Answered By - J_H