If you need this kind of safety measures against errors in future code
changes, could it be that you have some general QA problems?
One of the points behind a good coding style is that it should encourage code that is robust against trivial mistakes. Prefering
if (a) {
b;
}
over
if (a)
b;
I consider to be an example of this kind of simple safety. (And I have in the past seen people getting burned from the obvious error of sticking a debug printf in between.) ACTUALLY, I'd much, much rather prefer
if (a) b;
however checkpatch.pl gets angry about that as well (even though the kernel CodingStyle document would seem to actually allow this - it's still one statement and since "b" is outside the normal flow then it's "something to hide" and should be ok in any case).
(However, why waste time arguing over braces or not?)
Tell that to those who would use checkpatch.pl to gate incoming changesets.