Curly braces

Why would anyone seriously want to use curly braces to denote scope? Surely significant indentation, or implicit scope based on the surrounding keywords, is far superior.

Also consider this: every time you wish to enter { or }, you must hold down the shift key. That is one extra wasted keypress per scopening and sclosing.

And it just looks messy, like a spastic has been scribbling nonsense all over your screen.

>>47

The ability to do an assignment in the conditional of the if statement, like so

if (ptr = new Whatever())
    // handle any possible NULL pointer, such as from insufficient memory

Alternatively,
if ((ptr = new Whatever()) == NULL)