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Comments on Is omitting braces for single statements bad practice?
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Is omitting braces for single statements bad practice?
Consider this code:
while(arr[index] != 0)
index++;
vs
while(arr[index] != 0) {
index++;
}
Personally, I prefer the first. The fact that the braces are not needed makes them -- unnecessary. :)
To me, it's just clutter that wastes a line. Or 2 if you're one of them that also want the opening brace on a new line. The line waste can be avoided though, if you do like this:
while(arr[index] != 0) index++;
I often do that, and I like the style. Partially because it makes those loops stand out from loops with braces.
One argument I've heard for always using braces is that if you want to add another statement, then you need to remember adding braces or you will have bugs that can be hard to find. For instance, this would be an endless loop:
while(arr[index] != 0)
println("No zero found");
index++;
While this is technically true that this mistake can be done, I find it a bit meh as an argument. If you're using an editor that autoindents the code, this mistake would be spotted immediately. And since using such an editor is something that you should do anyway, the point of this argument is a bit moot.
Plus, even though I have often coded without such an editor, I cannot remember ever doing that mistake. It feels like a mistake that one could do if you're used to Python. But adjusting coding standards of C, C++, Java and such to not confuse Python coders does not really seem like the right path to go.
Apart from this argument, I have not really seen anything else than the consistency argument. That always using the same style is consistent. Well it's true, but consistency is not ALWAYS good.
Have I missed something here? What do you say? Is omitting braces for single statements bad practice?
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Post
I'm in the "Use the braces. Just use them every time" camp [1]. As others have suggested you or your tooling will catch a lot of cases where you screw up on this, but the ones that slip through can really hurt.
So, I was surprised to hear Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin opine that he's "on a mission to destroy all braces" (video link, but to the quote).
Now it was clear from the context that his preference is to get all the while statements into a form like
while ( someClearlyNamedCondition() )
takeClearlyNamedAction();
and similarly for if, so that there is never a need to have more than one line following the condition (changes to the named action should be made in takeClearlyNamedAction(), right?) and the code can be read aloud without ambiguity or difficulty.
Making that work is going to take some serious dedication to clean code and refactoring as you go, but elsewhere in the video series, Uncle Bob talks about the importance that he sees in adopting a discipline in your coding (he has TDD in particular in mind and gives an enlightening demonstration of how he goes about that).
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This is a change for me and one that has been slow in coming. I'm old enough to have done most of my formative programming in terminals with a severely limited number of lines (hey but at least they were CRTs: many of the people I learned from had learned on punch cards and line printers). For a long time I was a proponent of formatting decisions that saved vertical space (K&R braces, leaving off unnecessary brackets, and so on). Even then I would sometimes print code so that I could examine it in the large. ↩︎
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