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Comment by DanHulton | Hacker News Reader

Braces, y'all!

This is why you always, always, ALWAYS put braces around your if()s.

(I'm not religious about what line the open brace goes on, but I will reject any code review that skips the braces entirely.)

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Also, you almost never need to use goto.

This isn't goto's fault. A return, or a "finished = true;" or a ton of other code could have had the same result. Using a goto means it is easier to find it than some other similar mistakes.

All three of those patterns are something which would lead me to consider is there a more functional-style option available to rewrite the method in question. I'll take a gigantic nested if over a split-end method (multiple exit points) any day of the week ;) But of course, such things cannot be avoided completely, nor will avoiding them magically eliminate all bugs in the universe..

Hm, and I'm of the opposite opinion. I like methods that fail early. Gigantic if-chains are hella-hard to parse.

I should go consult Code Complete again, actually...

Does no one use a pretty printer before committing code? Pretty printing would eliminate any doubt as to what code belongs to what if-statement and the like.

I use Astyle to enforce both braces and indentation automatically. In VC Pre-Build Event add:

Astyle -A1 -j -c -v asterisk.cpp asterisk.h (Sorry asterisks italicize on HN) http://astyle.sourceforge.net/

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