[WesolyKubeczek]

I'd argue that in languages with manual resource management, you should be very careful how you return in the middle. Say you allocate something, or initialize communications with a device before a loop begins. In the middle of the loop, you find your result early and want to return it.

But your "return" should also have all deallocations performed! Also if you open communications to some external devices which tend to be notoriously stateful, you need to bring them back to a usable state by either completing commands sent so far, or resetting them, or whatever is needed.

If there is nothing analogous to "defer" statements or "finally" clauses, you will be in a world of pain if you sprinkle return statements without paying attention to all details.

Thus I can see a point of such a rule being in MISRA-C or something like it. Guess it's better to enforce an easily checkable rule (prone to birthing monsters) than educate all people properly.

[aulin]

Notice I purposedly used "reasonable" and "in the middle of a function". I know where this rule comes from. It's how it evolved into a blind prescription that is a problem.