Is there a reason to return null inside parentheses

Question

I found return(null) in

http://msdn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/library/system.xml.serialization.ixmlserializable.aspx

I wonder is there some reason for this parentheses ? Why not just return null?

Answer 1

Hmm this was a curious question so I did some browsing.

I found this post which was posted answered by Jon Skeet. He states sometimes it increases readability but has no performance or logical impact.

Another user suggests it is a hold over from long ago when some compilers for C required them.

Interesting to see an example on MSDN with it though, nice find.

MSDN also has this

Many programmers use parentheses to enclose the expression argument of the return statement. However, C does not require the parentheses.

Answer 2

There is no reason for that, you can just as easily type

return null;