Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen
From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: C Style (Was Re: == vs =)
Message-ID: <10535@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 22 Apr 88 15:20:02 GMT
References: <11216@brl-adm.ARPA> <2111@chinet.UUCP> <4403@garfield.UUCP> <226@hotlr.ATT> <130@obie.UUCP> <5981@utcsri.UUCP> <1982@ubc-cs.UUCP> <126@atpal.UUCP> <2823@mmintl.UUCP> <255@oink.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 20

In article <255@oink.UUCP> jep@oink.UUCP (James E. Prior) writes:

| Amen!, and I'll go one further
| 
|    if (var==TRUE)
| 
| is not only abominable, it can be dangerous.  var==TRUE tends to presume
| that the only valid values of var are FALSE and TRUE.  There are times
| when a var can very intentionally have a non-zero (true) value other than
| TRUE (1).  The classic kind of case of this is var=isalpha(c).  The

  If you *must* use stuff like this, at least you can write:
	if (var != FALSE)
which is more likely to work. There is only one good reason I can
determine to use code like that: some COBOL programmer wrote the style
specs for your organization.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me