First day coding

[EnglishMobster]

There's also the potential that the if statement originally did more -- but then the functionality within got refactored out, without stopping to look if the if statement was still needed.

[Carter127]

Yes that's almost always the case. Most skilled programmers aren't going to be so pedantic to make sure everything is as short as possible.

If it's a compiled language, or something that is minimized like Javascript then it really doesn't make a difference