Is it necessary to write else part in every if condition?

Question

The question I asked might be closed, But i just want to know that is it necessary to write else part of every if condition. One of my senior programmer said me that \"you shoul

Answer 1

In imperative languages like Java and C, if - else is a statement and does not return a value. So you can happily write only the if part and go on. And I think that it is the better practice rather than adding empty elses after every if.

However in functional languages like Haskell and Clojure, if is an expression and it must return a value. So it must be succeeded with an else. However there are still cases where you may not need an else section. Clojure, for such cases, has a when macro which wraps if - else to return nil in the else section and avoid writing it.

(when (met? somecondition)
  (dosomething))