Assignment in test: OK?

[Conor P. Cahill]

In article <928 at hls0.hls.oz> george at hls0.hls.oz (George Turczynski) writes:
>In article <BURLEY.90Sep6024459 at world.std.com>, burley at world.std.com (James C Burley) writes:
>> Your code is fine IMHO.  But suppose you had written the following
>> accidentally:
>> 
>>     if (foo = 0)
>> 
>> This is a common mistake.
>
>(typing mistake ?)
>
>This is only a mistake if you don't know what you're doing (or you have a
>typo, in which case it's only a mistake for a short while).  It is, in fact,
>perfectly legal C, but isn't what people sometimes want it to mean.

This is a BIG mistake because of any and all of the following:

	1. you might have made a typo
	2. someone else will have to determin if you might
	   have made a typo
	3. If it was a typo, these kinds of problems sometimes don't show
	   themselves for years and can be the hardest things to debug because
	   even though there is only a single = there you keep reading the
	   code and seeing two of them.

The fact that it is legal C doesn't really matter here.  That kind of
coding just makes maintenance harder.


-- 
Conor P. Cahill            (703)430-9247        Virtual Technologies, Inc.,
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