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Comment by blikdak | Hacker News Reader

One thing an old school C programmer would not do is neglect to put parens around their blocks.

Ritchie is the person who made the decision to make curlies optional in C. That's strong evidence he wouldn't add extraneous curlies to his code.

On the contrary! We force all our blocks to consist of a single statement so that we can always omit the damn parens.

Are you saying you need statements in your loop blocks!? I just added this to a school assignment:

    for (String next = in.readLine();
         next != null && dictionary.add(next);
         next = in.readLine());

...you can sense my contempt for this assignment. I would of course never do this in a real program.