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Opening and closing braces for if, for, or while statements should always be used, even if said statement's body contains only a single statement.

In the event that either of these statements are used in a macro, this implies that the macro definition should not be concluded with a semicolon (see PRE11-C. Do not conclude macro definitions with a semicolon).

Braces help improve the uniformity, and therefore readability of code.

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Macros can be used to execute a sequence of multiple statements as group.

Note that the following macro violates a macro with multiple statements should be wrapped in a do-while loop (see PRE10-C. Wrap multi-statement macros in a do-while loop), but for the purposes of this example it is not. However, the situation can still be salvaged if braces are used in the if statement.

#define DEC(x,y) \
  printf("Initial value was %d\n", x); \
  x -= y; \
  printf("Current value is %d\n", x)

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int x, y, z;

if (z == 0) {
  printf("Initial value was %d\n", x);
  x -= y;
  printf("Current value is %d\n", x)
}

Noncompliant Code Example

Risk Assessment

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