I've been contemplating this for a while now. I thought I would finally write on the subject and see what other people thought.
Do you really need blocks after if statements?
It has always been a best practice, in my opinion, to put opening and closing brackets after an if statement. Even if it has only one statement following.
| if(theSkyIsBlue) | |
| { | |
| DanceALittleDance(); | |
| } |
The reasoning behind this best practice goes something like this: If someone later modifies this code and adds a line inside the if, having the block will prevent them from doing something like this:
| if(theSkyIsBlue) | |
| DanceALittleDance(); | |
| MakeALittleLove(); |
Which, of course, will result in way too much love making, even on stormy days when the sky is mostly gray.
All those { } in if blocks add up to a lot of overhead
I’m not sure it is worth it anymore.
Most of the code I write now has one statement after an if block.
If I have some code like:
| if(theSkyIsBlue) | |
| { | |
| PutYourRightFootIn(); | |
| TakeYourRightFootOut(); | |
| DoTheHokeyPokey(); | |
| SpinYourselfAbout(); | |
| } |
It is pretty much always going to get refactored to:
| if(theSkyIsBlue) | |
| { | |
| DanceALittleDance(); | |
| } |
So, what is the real value of the { } here? If someone modifies this code, they are most likely going to modify the method DanceALittleDance; they really shouldn’t be adding anything to the if block. Even if they do, I think I’m paying a pretty high curly bracket tax all over my code to prevent someone from doing something stupid later on.
Is this really that bad?
| if(theSkyIsBlue) | |
| DanceALittleDance(); |
Perhaps there is a better best practice?
How about if we forgo all the extra curly braces and instead say:
Whenever possible replace an if block with a single statement.
Hmm, I think I like that better. We won’t run the risk anymore of accidentally adding a statement after the if block if we are used to thinking of an if block itself as a code smell.
Almost always you can describe what is being done in an if block with a better name and encapsulate it in a method.
Of course there are exceptions here. In a method with a void return type when you early return in an if block you can’t really replace that with a single statement. (Although sometimes you can avoid the early return by using an if else statement instead.)
We can apply the same thinking to anything that has a block statement.
Strangely though, try and catch require block statements to follow. You cannot have a single statement following a try.
Anyway, at this point I am pretty well convinced that including the { } “just because” is a pretty archaic practice and is unnecessarily cluttering up our code. If I am wrong, tell me why I am wrong, but as far as I can tell, if we prefer to extract statement blocks into methods, we can avoid the curly bracket tax everywhere.