[arp242]

The Go compiler inserts semi-colons. https://go.dev/ref/spec#Semicolons

If you follow those rules, you will see that this:

  if true;
  {
      fmt.Println()
  }
  else
  {
      fmt.Println()
  }

Will get rewritten to:

  if true;
  {
      fmt.Println();
  };
  else;
  {
      fmt.Println();
  };

And that won't work. That's why the braces need to be as "} else {". and "if .. {".

It used to be that the compiler gave some pretty confusing errors about semi-colons on this, but it seems that's been improved now.

JavaScript has similar semi-colon insertion by the way, but with some different (more confusing) rules.

[xandrius]

That's really neat, it had escaped me till now. Thanks for the explanation (today I'm one of the lucky 10,000!)