I once read somewhere that you should only use the if or unless conditionals at the end of a statement if that statement usually occurs (i.e., the condition usually passes). Otherwise, you should put the conditional at the beginning. For example, this is good behavior, since @post would normally be an ActiveRecord object:

first_comment = @post.comments.first unless @post.nil?

While this is not, since @post is rarely nil:

This makes sense for readability, but I find myself writing one-off statements with conditionals at the end, similar to the one above, because I don’t want to clutter up my code with a three line block:

The alternative that I have deemed “most correct” is to simply write this as one line. This can be done using the following syntax:

You can alternately replace then with a colon (:) but I think writing then is cleaner since it makes your code read like English. (I do wish I could get rid of that pesky end.)

So in the end, would you agree with this assessment, or should I just ignore that advice and simply use conditionals at the end of the statement?