[llvm-dev] Codifying our Brace rules-

[David Chisnall via llvm-dev]

On 23/06/2020 16:51, Adrian McCarthy via llvm-dev wrote:
> Personally, I favor "always use braces" because it helps readability for 
> me.  The compiler may be good at flagging misleading indentation, but my 
> visual processing system is terrible at it, especially since we use a 
> measly two spaces for indentation.  And we grant indentation exceptions 
> for--among other things--case labels in switches.

I remember fixing one bug in LLVM that was caused by not having braces 
around an if statement and a modification that didn't notice this.  I 
have fixed other bugs in a downstream fork where upstream has done this:

if (x) {
   something();
   somethingElse();
}

We've changed it to:

if (x) {
   something();
   somethingElse();
   ohAndOneMoreThing();
}

And then upstream has changed it to

if (x)
   something();

And, after merge, our code has been:

if (x)
   something();
   ohAndOneMoreThing();

In contrast, I have *never*, in any project, had to fix a bug that was 
caused by someone inserting redundant braces (or extra brackets) and 
someone else failing to understand the code.

As such, I am strongly in favour of requiring extra braces.  Static 
analysers will now often catch the bugs that they prevent but it's 
better to make it harder to introduce bugs in the first place than to 
depend on tooling to find them later.

David