alt Hacker NewsThat is a fucking travesty. If there’s one thing we should be able to rely on C for it’s that it works with assembly, and it’s always been the case that 0 is false and any other value is true. That’s a compiler bug as far as I’m concerned. I don’t use C++ because it’s gone in a ludicrous unhelpful direction since 2000 or so, but it’s sad to learn that C of all languages decided to favor pedantry over working code.
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You're not wrong. The processor has a perfectly good zero/notzero check. There was absolutely no reason for the compiler to check if x^1==0.
I still remember one of my first teachers of programming softly shaming me for writing a condition like
if (something == true)
I haven't done so ever since (1997), and thus I avoid the contrary (with == false) as well, using ! instead. But I would be a lot less ashamed if I knew that there are such conditions in production software.
I would also never guess that the problem described in the article may occur...
The code in question is:
Note that this is explicitly comparing two values, which is very different from checking whether a single value is true. Surely you wouldn't expect -1 == 0 to evaluate to true.