The following post is going to be an advanced curly-braces discussion with no right or wrong answer, just more “matter of taste”. It is about whether to put “else” (and other keywords, such as “catch”, “finally”) on a new line or not.
Some may write
if (something) {
doIt();
} else {
dontDoIt();
}
I, however, prefer
if (something) {
doIt();
}
else {
dontDoIt();
}
That looks silly, maybe. But what about comments? Where do they go? This somehow looks wrong to me:
// This is the case when something happens and blah
// blah blah, and then, etc...
if (something) {
doIt();
} else {
// This happens only 10% of the time, and then you
// better think twice about not doing it
dontDoIt();
}
Isn’t the following much better?
// This is the case when something happens and blah
// blah blah, and then, etc...
if (something) {
doIt();
}
// This happens only 10% of the time, and then you
// better think twice about not doing it
else {
dontDoIt();
}
In the second case, I’m really documenting the “if” and the “else” case separately. I’m not documenting the call to “dontDoIt()”. This can go further:
// This is the case when something happens and blah
// blah blah, and then, etc...
if (something) {
doIt();
}
// Just in case
else if (somethingElse) {
doSomethingElse();
}
// This happens only 10% of the time, and then you
// better think twice about not doing it
else {
dontDoIt();
}
Or with try-catch-finally:
// Let's try doing some business
try {
doIt();
}
// IOExceptions don't really occur
catch (IOException ignore) {}
// SQLExceptions need to be propagated
catch (SQLException e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
// Clean up some resources
finally {
cleanup();
}
It looks tidy, doesn’t it? As opposed to this:
// Let's try doing some business
try {
doIt();
} catch (IOException ignore) {
// IOExceptions don't really occur
} catch (SQLException e) {
// SQLExceptions need to be propagated
throw new RuntimeException(e);
} finally {
// Clean up some resources
cleanup();
}
I’m curious to hear your thoughts…
References: if – else coding style best practices from our JCG partner Lukas Eder at the JAVA, SQL, AND JOOQ blog.
