(octave.info)Returning from a Function

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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.

 -- : 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.