No, not always. Not in Go, or in Rust, or Ruby, for example. The assumption being in these languages that if is followed by an expression and that expression is parsed to its natural end anyway - but this only works if the syntax allows for that end to be found without ambiguity.

Yes, in C, but I believe Udo was talking about other languages (like Go for instance)

> and I also do if() even in cases where the language doesn't require it

This sentence could be parsed in multiple ways though :)

Not even in C. You can have an if condition that is actually a macro that expands with parentheses. For example the macros in ctype.h, so you can actually write

  if islower(c) {
      (..)
  }

Not in all languages. For example, Go and Swift don’t require it.