Thread: While statement

Originally Posted by laserlight

In this case 0 is not a magic number that should be replaced with a named constant because it is well known that return value of strcmp is to be compared with respect to 0. Instead, EQUAL is a "magic constant". For example, strcmp(x, y) > 0 is a test for whether x is > y: the ">" indicates the intended comparison. strcmp(x, y) > EQUAL is a test for whether... huh? As such, if I were your professor, I would mark you down for using EQUAL. And no, ZERO does no better as it does not provide any additional information, and it is extremely implausible (and misleading if it were so) that ZERO might be defined to something else. In this case, 0 is correct.

I've caught him on numerous occassions writing out his code in a very unorthodox manner (at least with respect to our style guide), and he has thrown #define's all over the place. When I saw him
#define x "x"
#define y "y"
because we were going to do a few strcmp's in the program, I think it was at this point I felt like I needed to define basically everything. But I haven't seen him explicitly #define the return value of strcmp and you do make a good point, so I'll change it.

Originally Posted by laserlight

Then change it to return a char*, or break up your expressions into different statements.

I'd have thought of that if I didn't already run into the mess between pointers and arrays in a previous thread.