title: Best practice for matrix operation code
body: <p>Below is a function that was included in the class I am using to perform operations on matrices. The function returns a boolean value, the first IF statement if NOT TRUE, it returns a value of false, so I assume once it returns this value the rest of the function doesn't execute because it has already returned a value.</p>
  
  <p>If I had written the function I would have included the FOR loop inside an ELSE construct appended to the original IF statement. I'm not a professional programmer so I apologize if the answer is obvious, I just would not have written the code this way and I'm curious if changing all the functions written this way is worth it.</p>
  
  <pre><code>public bool IsIdentityMatrix()
  {
      if (!this.IsSquareMatrix())
      {
          return false;
      }
  
      for (int i = 0; i &lt; this.RowCount; i++)
      {
          for (int j = 0; j &lt; this.ColumnCount; j++)
          {
              decimal checkValue = 0;
              if (i == j)
              {
                  checkValue = 1;
              }
  
              if (mInnerMatrix[i, j] != checkValue)
              {
                  return false;
              }
          }
      }
  }
  </code></pre>