I believe some people really need think in term of comparations and, for those, adding a "==" symbol make sense, even if the resultant code doesn't make any sense at all!!

Also, I can never understand why people write ..

    if (foo()) {
        return true;
    } else {
        return false;
    }

.. or things like extra parens on conditionals, or weird styles like:

    return (false);

I strongly believe people write as they talk, and talk as they think; which not clearly translates linearly when what you write is code ;)

Responding to GP; I think it's a tiny bit clearer with `== true`, but I don't feel particularly strongly about it. I wrote this code without caring too much about style and cleanliness.

However, I don't agree that the shortest code is always the cleanest. In JS for example, I've found that wrapping every conditional body in braces even if it's a single statement helps avoid bugs and clear out ambiguity.

Also, this code:

    if (foo()) {
        return true;
    } else {
        return false;
    }

is not equivalent to

    return foo();

because foo() could return something that isn't boolean. The correct short version would be:

    return !!foo();

It's far less obvious what is going on here. That said, I'd probably go with:

    return foo() ? true : false;

Many languages are expressions (as opposed to statements) including C-like languages. I've always thought that 'return' itself was redundant. If a compound statement was defined to return the value of the final (executed) statement, then functional methods would get much simpler. And remove the need for the '?' operator for instance.

e.g.

   int foo(int x) {   bar(x,y); }

or

   x = {if (foo() > 9) true; else false; }

I think one problem with statements-as-expression is that is not always evident which should be their result.

for instance:

    bool r = if (test()) {
      false;
    } else {
      true;
    }

what r should be set to? true or false?

I don't see the point of adding such complexity.. it's waaay more clear to be explicit

    bool r = test();
    if (r) {
      false;
    } else {
      true;
    }

or, if you intended the other way

    bool r;
    if (test()) {
      r = false;
    } else {
      r = true;
    }

I guess that's why you need to be strictly correct, or highly opinionated, to design a language.

I'm missing your point I guess. All those are equivalent? In C an assignment has the value of the RHS, so that doesn't change anything in these examples.

That is unnecessary verbosity. Try this instead:

    bool r = !test();

Have you tried coffeescript? Your examples are pretty close to valid code that does what you want.

In an imperative language, you still might want an optional return to jump out of the middle of some code.

You might like functional languages.