Putting a return at the end of such procedures would blow megabytes of
memory and slow down the machine?
Let me tell you a story. In the early days of Excel, Apple made some
changes to MacOS that caused the one existing version of Excel to crash.
Microsoft didn't want to make a crucial change to one of their
procedures because it added 12 clock cycles to the function, and it was
a heavily used function. In their 3-hour Excel stress test, that
function was called 76,000 times. Some programmer went ahead and made
the change, just to see how much slower the new version would be. It
was about .1 seconds slower on that 3 hour stress test. The change was
left in.
I'm not trying to say that optimizations and good algorithms aren't
important, but this really does present a case for not placing too much
emphasis on efficiency.