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I was going to say that a compiler should issue a warning for this, as you'd almost never want a semicolon right after an if condition, but to my surprise Eclipse doesn't seem to flag it.

It does however indent the line after the semicolon to the same level as the if, which is at least a red flag that something is up, if you are used to how the auto-indenting normally works.

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Absolutely, indentation helps catch this when writing.

When I've seen this happen, it wasn't because of a semicolon added when the code was written. It was someone accidentally adding a semicolon to a line later, without realizing it. Unless they then went to the next line and hit the "fix indentation" key, they didn't catch it.

Both clang and gcc warn on "if(1);", clang by default, gcc with -Wextra. clang also warns on "while(1);" - I think this is somewhat obnoxious, since it can be useful, and would prefer if it only warned if the semicolon was followed by an opening brace, but YMMV.

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