Question

I recently found one of my fellow programmers wrote something like:

int foo()
{
    //some code
    {
        //some code
    }
    //some code
    {
        //some code
    }
    //some code
}

As you can see, the two inner pairs of curling braces serve only to logically separate two blocks of code. Although I have written C for some time, I never really saw such style. Is this considered a good, or, at least, an acceptable style in C?

Answer 1

I don’t think this is a particularly good style – it superfluously increases indentation, leaves less space for a line and in parallel, it decreases readability. If you have several “logic modules”, you can either separare them using an empty line, like

/* declarations */
char *str;
size_t size;

/* allocate memory */
size = 16;
str = malloc(size);
if (str == NULL) {
    return -1;
}

/* do actual task */

etc. Or, if you have large chunks of code, you should consider refactoring it and breaking them up into separate functions.