FRESH

Hacker News

Side-Effectful Expressions in C (2023)

26 points by surprisetalk

by commandlinefan

1 subcomments

Maybe I'm just Stockholm syndrome-d into the C programming language, but none of the examples here are terribly compelling to me - I love articles about C's weirdness, but I don't really think his before and after comparisons make a case for a replacement for C.

by nadavdebi

0 subcomment

by andrewla

1 subcomments

Really this is mainly about the ++ and -- operators. I think Go made the right call here and allows these only as statements, not as expressions. I will basically never use these in code I write and will remove it from code I maintain or review; the only value add is compactness which is very rarely a goal.
The other side effect expression here is the equals operator; once again, this should not be an expression but should just be a statement. Once again this is used (intentionally) mainly for compactness and unintentionally used to create messy bugs. I do find the "yoda" style checks to be aesthetically unpleasing so I'm party of the problem here.
Maybe it's time to add `-Wno-crement-expressions` and `-Wno-assignment-expressions`. `-Wparentheses` gets you part of the way to the second but even the legitimate uses are ugly to my eye.