There's an argument (and I think a good one) that in structured programming there should be only one return per function. It's not that hard -- you just have a variable and you set it to what you want to return and the last line of the function returns that variable. I think that some things Wirth did with Oberon, particularly in the post Oberon-OS versions like Oberon-07, are a bit restrictive, but they are always in the service of making code easier to read, even if it makes it slightly harder to write.

The problem is that pure structured programming just sucks. It doesn't have a good answers for cleanups or error handling.

Structured programming was the answer to the earlier mess with unstructured gotos, but in the process of trying to improve it, structured programming became just as messy when taken dogmatically.

In real life, what matters is the mental load. Every ambient condition that you need to track adds mental load. Early returns/breaks/continues reduce it while in a "structured program" you have to keep track of them until the end of the function.

> It's not that hard -- you just have a variable and you set it to what you want to return and the last line of the function returns that variable.

And also have a flag "skip to return" to skip all the conditions. Or you end up mutating arguments of the function. I know, I suffered through programming on Standard Pascal.