As part of a code standards document I wrote awhile back, I enforce \"you must always use braces for loops and/or conditional code blocks, even (especially) if they\'re only one
Wow. NO ONE is aware of the dangling else problem? This is essentially THE reason for always using braces.
In a nutshell, you can have nasty ambiguous logic with else statements, especially when they're nested. Different compilers resolve the ambiguity in their own ways. It can be a huge problem to leave off braces if you don't know what you're doing.
Aesthetics and readability has nothing to do it.