[Dewie]

I've on a few occasions had problems with semicolons in Java: accidently putting a semicolong like this:

if (something()); { somethingOther(); }

The semicolon seemed to shortcut the whole if-block. I don't know why that thing is even allowed by the compiler.

[ufo]

Being able to write if and while loops with am empty body is due to braces being optional if you only have one statement and due to the empty statement being a legal statement (doing so keepsthings simpler).

As for the second {}, its to allow you to create inner scopes where you can declare variables with a more restricted scope without needing to do something silly like "if(true)".

Empty block statements are OK sometimes with while and for loops when the real action that matters is in the condition:

    while(!trySomething()){} //empty body for the loop

And since these language

[pcwalton]

This error can't happen in Rust. If blocks must be braced.

[mcguire]

The semicolon following the conditional is an empty statement; it ends the if statement equivalently to "if (something()) { }". It's not often seen, but sometimes can be found in:

     for (i = 0; a[i] != x; i++) ;

to find the first index equaling x.

Personally, I always use braces in conditional and loop statements, so I'll never have the empty statement semicolon. But that's me.

[Dewie]

> Personally, I always use braces in conditional and loop statements, so I'll never have the empty statement semicolon. But that's me.

But if you have

if (something()); { somethingOther(); }

Then you have a new problem: you intended the braced statement to execute iff the if-statement evaluated to true. But since you put the semicolon after if by accident, now the braced part will execute no matter what the if-condition evaluates to.

(my point was about unintentional use of semicolon after if-statement - in which case always using braces doesn't seem to help.)