At my first programming job they were religious about the single `return' and followed a pattern that was bizarre and luckily I've not seen since--using a `retVal' variable declared at the top.

  int foo(int bar) {
    int retVal = -1;
    if (bar == 1) {
      retVal = 1;
    }
    if ((retVal % 2) == 0) {
      retVal = 2; 
    }
    return retVal;
   }