Creating a border using ncurses
You can create a block without an if statement.
For example, these are equivalent:

{
    // some code
}

if (true) {
    // some code
}


But it's not a good practice to create blocks like this.
It's a code smell,
suggesting to wrap // some code in a dedicated function instead.

Anytime you think some neat trick is "unconventional",
it's most probably a bad practice. Don't do it, fix it.