Floating curly braces in C#

Question

I ran across a piece of C# code today I had not seen before. The programmer defined a block of code using only curly braces (no if, class, function, etc).

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Answer 1

The braces {} in C# define scope. Anything defined within them goes "out of scope" once the braces are terminated.

The example seems kind of pointless. I can't imagine why it would be used in real world code. I'm assuming you pared down the code presented?

Answer 2

It limits the scope of the variable to within that block. So the variable i would not be able to be seen outside of those braces.

It can also be a preference on if someone wants to separate code but using this when not necessary would in most cases be superfluous.

Answer 3

Any variable inside the "scope" of these curly braces will be out of scope outside of it.

Answer 4

There is no purpose to that code at all. Probably an artifact from something else he/she was trying to do. As the comment shows this won't even compile because i is out of scope.

From a coding style perspective I personally don't like it and I've never seen someone use floating braces to "organize" their code before.

Answer 5

You can use an open and close set of curly braces to define a self containing block, which has its own scope.

This is generally not considered good programming practice, though.

Usually if someone is doing something like this, it's probably better to create a method/function in its place.

Answer 6

The purpose of this is to illustrate that the int i is actually in a different scope than the incremented i below it.