Why I (Occasionally) Use Empty Statements

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• Posted: August 20, 2010
• By: Tieson
• Tags: C#, empty, statement

I was working on a class project this summer, and one of my classmates was questioning why I used something like this:

   1:  internal void Initialize()

   2:  {

   3:      ;

   4:  }

It's something programmers call an empty statement. He thought the lonely semicolon was odd, and seemed to think I shouldn't have it there. Well, here's what Microsoft says:

The empty statement consists of a single semicolon. It does nothing and can be used in places where a statement is required but no action needs to be performed.

Basically, while an empty statement literally does nothing in the compiled project, it does do at least two things for me:

1. Indicates that this is NOT a forgotten statement, but rather one I either don't need right now or that I don't intend to implement, but left in place for consistency (maybe to match a coding pattern).
2. Allows me to wire up things like event handlers that I don't have logic for, yet.

I'm not really sure where I picked this habit up from, but I think there is nothing wrong with using empty statements, even if some people think it's wasteful...