How would you end up with<p><pre><code>    if (rc &lt; 0) return rc;
      goto fail;
</code></pre>
Why would you indent hat next line? Presumably because you were trying to add it to the existing if statement&#x27;s non-existant block. But why would you do that if you don&#x27;t see a block?<p>The problem with<p><pre><code>    if (rc &lt; 0)
      return rc;
</code></pre>
is that we see the indentation and infer that there must be a block, so it&#x27;s tempting to try to add to the block.<p>When you keep your entire conditional statement on one line, it looks, to someone scanning the code, like just any other line. It doesn&#x27;t look like a block at all, in fact it looks more like a function call.