Brackets

When writing a language where

{ ... }

or

BEGIN ... END

are optional, I always put them in. Some people say this takes up space when not required, but I find it useful to help clearly define branches in code. This:

if(foo)
{
     Console.WriteLine("I am in a branch");
}

does not take up much more space than

if(foo)
     Console.WriteLine("I'm in a branch");

Adding brackets also makes things more standard as they are still required for multi-line statements in branches. It also helps prevent the following scenario:

if(foo)
     //Console.WriteLine("I'm in a branch");


Console.WriteLine("Because the previous line is commented out, I'm in a branch");

I worked on a project where this happened, and it took the team about 45 minutes to track down the problem instead of continuing with development (45 minutes doesn’t sound like a long time until you realize that it’s 45 minutes * 5 developers). In a pristine environment, this probably would be easily noticed and corrected, but most legacy code is far from it, and so I prefer every advantage I can have to make code do what I expect it to. Some languages won’t even allow something akin to the following:

if(foo)
{
   //Console.WriteLine("I still compile and execute");
}

In truth, most do, but it doesn’t really matter. The brackets force the end scope of the branch, and don’t allow it accidentally affect the next statement in the program. A lot of people forget that

if(foo)



Console.WriteLine("This is affected by the conditional statement above");

because it’s common to write the code like so:

if(foo)
     Console.WriteLine("This is how most people write it");

and in a lot of languages with beginning and ending delimiters, white space is ignored by the compiler.