Comment by josephg

No; I wouldn't do it if I was just calling them once each in a particular order. And I don't often use this trick for simple functions. But sometimes long functions have repeated behaviour.

For example, in this case I needed to do two recursive tree walks inside this function, so each walk was expressed as an inner function which recursively called itself, and each is called once from the top level method:

https://github.com/ottypes/json1/blob/05ef789cc697888802e786...

I don't do it like this often though. The code in this file is easily the most complex code I've written in nearly 3 decades of programming. Here my ability to read and edit the code is easily the most important factor. I think this form makes the core algorithm more clear than any other way I could factor this code. I considered smearing this internal logic out over several top level methods, but I doubt that would be any easier to read.