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Should an if statement always have an else?
No. If you don’t need to run any code on the else side, you don’t need an else clause. It is clear by the responses here that no one feels an unused else is needed.
Are if statements bad practice?
The if statement is rarely considered as “evil” as goto or mutable global variables — and even the latter are actually not universally and absolutely evil. I would suggest taking the claim as a bit hyperbolic. It also largely depends on your programming language and environment.
What’s wrong with if-else statements?
The problem with if statements is that novice (or just bad) programmers over use them when other constructs would be more suitable. Too often, such programmers create baroque and fragile structures out of chains of if-elif-else or deeply nested if-else or both.
Why do you avoid the ” avoid if else ” statement?
Another way to look at the “avoiding if/else” statement is to think in terms of decisions. The objective is to avoid confusion when following code. When you have multiple if/else statements that are nested, it becomes hard to understand the functions main objective. The programmer writing the code understands the logic now.
Do you write if statement in negated form?
It is obfuscated programming, causing even the most seasoned of programmers to back up and re-read the if condition in its negated form. So write it in the negated form in the first place and omit the else statement (or have an empty else or comment to that effect if mandated to do so).
How to avoid ” avoid if-else ” advice in coding?
At the cost of an additional evaluation of X (which, if it is computationally complex to evaluate X, you can perform up front and store in a boolean variable), you make the structure a single-level if/else decision tree, and when editing each branch, you know the condition that must be true to enter it.
Is it true that negations are more intuitive than closed doors?
It is not false that testing for a closed door is more intuitive than testing for a non-opened door. Negations, and especially nested negations, are usually difficult to understand: To solve that, instead of adding empty blocks, create additional properties, when relevant, or local variables.