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As a non-Go developer, IMO the mistake is not putting the opening brace on its own line, for the “smashed into the top” reason you mention.

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As far as I understand, that's a consequence of the automatic insertion of trailing semicolon by the lexer, not a decision by gofmt. It's explained here: https://go.dev/doc/effective_go#semicolons

I see. That doesn’t seem very sensible in potential-beginning-of-block contexts, in particular in the if case where an implicit empty statement is deduced after the condition.

> That doesn’t seem very sensible in potential-beginning-of-block contexts, in particular in the if case where an implicit empty statement is deduced after the condition.

Are you referring to C style if statements where you can elide the braces?

In go the braces are mandatory, so I don't think that really applies.

I was referring to the Go documentation linked above:

> One consequence of the semicolon insertion rules is that you cannot put the opening brace of a control structure (if, for, switch, or select) on the next line. If you do, a semicolon will be inserted before the brace, which could cause unwanted effects.

I was assuming that the “unwanted effects” are not simply a syntax error.

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