Code Complete, 2nd Edition

Compound Statements (Blocks)

A "compound statement" or "block" is a collection of statements that are treated as a single statement for purposes of controlling the flow of a program. Compound statements are created by writing { and } around a group of statements in C++, C#, C, and Java. Sometimes they are implied by the keywords of a command, such as For and Next in Visual Basic. Guidelines for using compound statements effectively follow:

Write pairs of braces together. Fill in the middle after you write both the opening and closing parts of a block. People often complain about how hard it is to match pairs of braces or begin-and-end pairs, and that's a completely unnecessary problem. If you follow this guideline, you will never have trouble matching ...