if statement equal question

[Marius Constantin]

Hello Experts !

I was wondering. is this piece of code

 if (a < b) ; 

similar with this one

 if (a < b) { } 

?

Thank you so very much !

kind regards,
marius

[Greg Brannon]

Well, both of them are valid and do nothing if a < b, so in that way they're similar. What do you really want to know?

[Marius Constantin]

Greg Brannon wrote:Well, both of them are valid and do nothing if a < b, so in that way they're similar. What do you really want to know?

Thank you very much for your help !

I just wanted to know if this two pieces of code are 2 different ways to express the same thing. In case a < d do nothing.
And the answer is yes, right ?

thank you so much,
marius

[fred rosenberger]

here's another way to do it:

since you don't do anything different if a >= b, it's just like doing nothing at all

On a more serious note, if you have to do something like this, i would always go with the latter. it is EXTREMELY easy to overlook that semi-colon later on when you come back and decide you DO want to do something when a < b. If you put in the braces now, it's relatively trivial to drop in your new code.

If you don't, odds are high that at some point, you will come back, add the braces, overlook the semicolon, and pull your hair out for a while when your code doesn't work how you think it should.

[Rishiraj Bayerd]

It is do-nothing situation with if block.
The first snippet just act as an instruction. That is, the execution of just immediate instruction of if
never depends it.

The second snippet is an if -block with empty scope. So, there are nothing to execute after result of the if-condition become true.

So, the result of the snippets become same.