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octave: Returning from a Function

 
 11.7 Returning from a Function
 ==============================
 
 The body of a user-defined function can contain a ‘return’ statement.
 This statement returns control to the rest of the Octave program.  It
 looks like this:
 
      return
 
    Unlike the ‘return’ statement in C, Octave’s ‘return’ statement
 cannot be used to return a value from a function.  Instead, you must
 assign values to the list of return variables that are part of the
 ‘function’ statement.  The ‘return’ statement simply makes it easier to
 exit a function from a deeply nested loop or conditional statement.
 
    Here is an example of a function that checks to see if any elements
 of a vector are nonzero.
 
      function retval = any_nonzero (v)
        retval = 0;
        for i = 1:length (v)
          if (v (i) != 0)
            retval = 1;
            return;
          endif
        endfor
        printf ("no nonzero elements found\n");
      endfunction
 
    Note that this function could not have been written using the ‘break’
 statement to exit the loop once a nonzero value is found without adding
 extra logic to avoid printing the message if the vector does contain a
 nonzero element.
 
  -- Keyword: return
      When Octave encounters the keyword ‘return’ inside a function or
      script, it returns control to the caller immediately.  At the top
      level, the return statement is ignored.  A ‘return’ statement is
      assumed at the end of every function definition.
 

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