> Personally, I always use braces in conditional and loop statements, so I'll never have the empty statement semicolon. But that's me.

But if you have

if (something()); { somethingOther(); }

Then you have a new problem: you intended the braced statement to execute iff the if-statement evaluated to true. But since you put the semicolon after if by accident, now the braced part will execute no matter what the if-condition evaluates to.

(my point was about unintentional use of semicolon after if-statement - in which case always using braces doesn't seem to help.)