Well, in Python, if you duplicate a return statement, then your code will recognize only the first statement. This, for example, will return 1: def func():

Well, in Python, if you duplicate a return statement, then your code will recognize only the first statement. This, for example, will return 1: def func(): return 1 return 2 If the code from the goto fail example was written in Python so as to return an object when a condition was met, and it ended up with 2 return statements, then Python would have just returned the first one in the proper scope and moved on. Of course, this still depends on implementation in the code itself.