Nasty JavaScript wart (or rather, don't take shortcuts)

I had a piece of code that looked like this:

function add_to_form(f, all_day) {
  console.log(all_day);
  if (all_day)
    $('input[name="all_day"]', f).val('1');
  else;
    $('input[name="all_day"]', f).val('');
  console.log($('input[name="all_day"]', f).val(''));
  return f; 
}

When I ran it, the console output was this:

true
(an empty string)

What had happened was that I had accidentally put a semi-colon after the else statement. Accidentally as in stumbled on the keyboard. I didn't spot it because semi-colons are so common in JavaScript that you sort of go blind to them.

The wart was that it didn't cause a syntax error. IMHO it should have because you'd expect there to always be something happening after the else.

So instead of using the shortcut notation for if statements I've decided to write it out in full instead:

function add_to_form(f, all_day) {
  if (all_day) {
     $('input[name="all_day"]', f).val('1');
  } else {
     $('input[name="all_day"]', f).val('');
  }
  return f; 
}

Optimizers like Google Closure will do a much better job optimizing the code than I ever will anyway.