That's what I'd thought for may be over a decade. About ~3 years ago I revamped my personal coding style to eliminate as unnecessary baggage as possible. As part of that I stopped using braces for single line if and I'd yet to bump in a bug because of that. Overall I find code looks more compact and cleaner, may be even less friction to read. Nowadays when I see a braces around single line if I get that "oh that's clunky code" feeling in my stomach. Things are worse with C# and lot of Java code where people insist not only having braces around single line if but also have { on its own separate lines.
I think a good language shouldn't have braces to mark blocks in first place. Given indentation,they are redundant most of the times and they just contribute in clunk. This is exactly the case with Python and hence this is essentially a default style and people hadn't be complaining about it's causing bugs.
There's an enormous difference with Python, because the indentation is syntax. These two code snippets, one in Python, the other in C, do not mean the same thing:
C:
if (condition)
statement_1();
statement_2();
Python:
if condition:
statement_1()
statement_2()
Personally, I always use braces in C and C++, even though it is more clunky. I want the assurance. I also frequently have to make changes to code that does not use braces, and then I have to add the braces in because I am adding statements to a conditional. To me, that is more clunky.
I think a good language shouldn't have braces to mark blocks in first place. Given indentation,they are redundant most of the times and they just contribute in clunk. This is exactly the case with Python and hence this is essentially a default style and people hadn't be complaining about it's causing bugs.
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