<div class="gmail_quote">On 3 January 2012 09:55, Raymond Hettinger <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:raymond.hettinger@gmail.com">raymond.hettinger@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div class="im"><br><div><div>On Jan 2, 2012, at 2:09 PM, Tim Delaney wrote:</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><span style="border-collapse:separate;font-family:Helvetica;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;line-height:normal;text-align:-webkit-auto;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;font-size:medium">I'd also point out that if you're expecting braces, not having them can make the code less readable.<span> </span></span></blockquote>
</div><div><br></div></div><div>If a programmer's mind explodes when they look at the simple and beautiful</div><div>examples in K&R's The C Programming Language, then they've got problems</div><div>that can't be solved by braces ;-)</div>
</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Now that's just hyperbole ;)</div><div><br></div><div>If you've got a mix of braces and non-braces in a chunk of code, it's very easy for the mind to skip over the non-brace blocks as not being blocks. I know it's not something I'm likely to mess up when reading the code in-depth, but if I'm skimming over trying to understand the gist of the code or looking for what should be an obvious bug, a block that's not brace-delimited is more likely to be missed than one that is (when amongst other blocks that are).</div>
<div><br></div><div>If we had the option of "just use indentation" in C I'd advocate that. Failing that, I find that consistent usage of braces is preferable.</div><div><br></div><div>Cheers,</div><div><br></div>
<div>Tim Delaney </div></div>