Chapter 14. Blocks and Statements

There are many kinds of statements in the Java programming language. Most correspond to statements in the C and C++ languages, but some are unique.

As in C and C++, the if statement of the Java programming language suffers from the so-called "dangling else problem," illustrated by this misleadingly formatted example:

if (door.isOpen())
    if (resident.isVisible())
        resident.greet("Hello!");
else door.bell.ring();  // A "dangling else"

The problem is that both the outer if statement and the inner if statement might conceivably own the else clause. In this example, one might surmise that the programmer intended the else clause to belong to the outer if statement.

The Java programming language, like C and C++ and many programming languages before them, arbitrarily decrees that an else clause belongs to the innermost if to which it might possibly belong. This rule is captured by the following grammar:

Statement:
    StatementWithoutTrailingSubstatement
    LabeledStatement
    IfThenStatement
    IfThenElseStatement
    WhileStatement
    ForStatement

StatementWithoutTrailingSubstatement:
    Block
    EmptyStatement
    ExpressionStatement
    AssertStatement
    SwitchStatement
    DoStatement
    BreakStatement
    ContinueStatement
    ReturnStatement
    SynchronizedStatement
    ThrowStatement
    TryStatement

StatementNoShortIf:
    StatementWithoutTrailingSubstatement
    LabeledStatementNoShortIf
    IfThenElseStatementNoShortIf
    WhileStatementNoShortIf
    ForStatementNoShortIf

The following are repeated from §14.9 to make the presentation here clearer:

IfThenStatement:
    if ( Expression ) Statement

IfThenElseStatement:
    if ( Expression ) StatementNoShortIf else Statement

IfThenElseStatementNoShortIf:
    if ( Expression ) StatementNoShortIf else StatementNoShortIf

Statements are thus grammatically divided into two categories: those that might end in anif statement that has no else clause (a "short if statement") and those that definitely do not.

Only statements that definitely do not end in a short if statement may appear as an immediate substatement before the keyword else in an if statement that does have an else clause.

This simple rule prevents the "dangling else" problem. The execution behavior of a statement with the "no short if" restriction is identical to the execution behavior of the same kind of statement without the "no short if" restriction; the distinction is drawn purely to resolve the syntactic difficulty.