Yeah, is there precedent for that? It looks fucking nutty. Can you do it in the middle of the function!? So odd. There's a lot of cruft in java, but I'm not sure the return statement is even on the list of things I'd bother attacking.
Where did you see that it says you can do it in the middle of a function? I understood it implicitly returns the last expression.
Generally code is written to not need to return from the middle of a function. This is only really inconvenient in loops, and at least Dylan, Lisp, and Smalltalk make some provision for an "early return."