Post History

**Advantages of Mandatory Braces**

* When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Since every popular coding standard for java mandates the use of braces, and every popular code style checking tool enforces their use, omitting these braces is highly unusual, making your code slightly harder to maintain for those unused to that.
* Omitted braces have contributed to some [rather serious bugs](https://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2014/03/apples-gotofail-ssl-security-bug-was-easily-preventable/).

**Disadvantages of Mandatory Braces**

* Additional programmer effort for writing the braces. Can be largely mitigated by tooling (for instance by configuring an eclipse save action to add them automatically)
* Additional programmer effort for skipping over braces when reading code. This effect is likely very small, since java programmers are highly used to dealing with braces anyway.

**Conclusion**

While the advantages of mandatory braces are usually small, the cost of using them seems even smaller. So if I had to decide, I'd write those braces. 

However, since the difference is so small, I'd not expend significant effort or political capital on this.