Returning early is good. Breaking consistency of 'ifs' is not. Shorter functions (in physical length, not amount of code) are not any more readable. It's more important to keep consistent visual cues rather than optimizing pixel length. When you scan text you don't actually read individual characters but look for shapes and visual patterns. It's called typoglycemia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typoglycemia). I want ifs to always look like ifs. Since it's not reasonable to have all ifs in one line let's have them all in multiple lines to create consistency. No exceptions.