groovy: use brackets on method calls or not?

Question

this is a fairly general question about whether people should be using brackets on method calls that take parameters or not. i.e.

def someFunc(def p) {
...
}

then calling:

someFunc "abc"

vs...

someFunc("abc")

Is this just a question of consistency, or is there specific use cases for each?

Answer 1

It's primarily a question of consistency and readability, but note that Groovy won't always let you get away with omitting parentheses. For one, you can't omit parentheses in nested method calls:

def foo(n) { n }
println foo 1 // won't work

See the section entitled "Omitting parentheses" in the Style guide.

Answer 2

There's no specific case where you must remove them, you can always use them. It's just prettier to leave them out.
There are cases where you can't do that (where you could confuse a list/map parameter with a subscript operator for instance, nested calls, or when the statement is an assignment), but the general rule is that the outmost call can have no parenthesis if there is no ambiguity.
(deleted several lines, as I've just received notification that there is a post already with that info) Groovy 1.8 will allow even more cases to omit parenthesis, you can check them out at
http://groovyconsole.appspot.com/script/355001

Answer 3

"an empty pair of parentheses is just useless syntactical noise!"

It seems to me that they are encouraging you to use parenthesis when they serve a purpose, but omit them when they are just "noise"