I wasted a whole bunch of hours recently tracking down what turned out to be
a bug in MDR that looked like this:
if (item.endName.equals(assocStorable.getEnd2Name())) {
assoc.refRemoveLink((RefObject) temp, thisObject);
} else {
assoc.refRemoveLink(thisObject, (RefObject) temp);
if (item.isAggregate)
((RefObject) temp).refDelete();
}
where the visual appearance didn't match the actual logic. Checkstyle
probably would have flagged that the indentation didn't match the logic
level, but to be extra safe I've made Checkstyle stricter and it will now
require braces for all conditionals. Please observe this requirement for
new code and clean up any module that you are working on (no need to go back
and rework things that aren't going to be touched for some other reason).
I used to think single line if statements were ok without braces, but they
just end up getting broken into two lines and indented and then someone adds
an else arm and it's all just a slippery slope, so we're just going to
require braces for everything. I generally prefer vertically compact code,
but, in this case, I think the extra white space is worth the additional
safety.
Tom
