I think it is a matter of being consistent. Both ways have certain syntactic dis/advantages. The first one enables you to have the function call directly in th

I think it is a matter of being consistent. Both ways have certain syntactic dis/advantages. The first one enables you to have the function call directly in the if statement, but requires you to define a variable beforehand. The latter gives you the option to check the return value, pass a NULL, if you don't need it for example, and use the return value directly.