5 ms·

It's better to use -Wall -Werror options for C compiler.

• ben509 9y ago
  Agreed, fix the tools, not the person. Really, any source you have control over should have all error checking possible turned on and breaking immediately, _especially_ with C derivatives.
• cup-of-tea 9y ago
  That won't always catch the error and even if it did, why is it better?
  • ben509 9y ago
    -Wall can almost always catch the problem as it will insist on redundant parens surrounding an assignment. So you can only screw it up if you typed extra parens for an equality expression. Variable on left is conventional, it's how people sound it out in their head, so it's just easier to process mentally when the expression becomes more complex. Yoda syntax catches that single error at the expense of making all equality expressions harder to write, read and maintain. And, besides, if you're going to use Yoda syntax, you're going to want your linter to enforce it... at which point you may as well turn on -Wall anyway.
    • greenhouse_gas 9y ago
      Also how do you prevent "if(a=b)" if both sides are variables?
      • ben509 9y ago
        I will let clang's amazingly detailed error messages speak for themselves: ben@burnination ~ $ cat test.c int main() { int a = 3; int b = 2; if (a=b) { return 1; } else { return 0; } } ben@burnination ~ $ clang -Wall test.c test.c:4:10: warning: using the result of an assignment as a condition without parentheses [-Wparentheses] if (a=b) { ~^~ test.c:4:10: note: place parentheses around the assignment to silence this warning if (a=b) { ^ ( ) test.c:4:10: note: use '==' to turn this assignment into an equality comparison if (a=b) { ^ == 1 warning generated.