Comment by BuyMyBitcoins 9 hours ago
I am surprised at common it is for software engineers to not treat booleans properly. I can’t tell you how many times if seen ‘if(IsFoo(X) != false)’
It never used to bug me as a junior dev, but once a peer pointed this out it became impossible for me to ignore.
Sometimes this kind of thing happens after a few revisions of code, where in earlier versions the structure of the code made more sense: maybe several conditions which were tested and then, due to changing requirements, they coalesced into something which now reads as nonsense.
When making a code change which touches a lot of places, it's not always obvious to "zoom out" and read the surrounding context to see if the structure of the code can be updated. The developer may be chewing through a grep list of a few dozen locations that need to be changed.
Clearly the correct spelling is
`if(X&IsFooMask != 0)`
:)
The most egregious one I saw, I was tracking down a bug and found code like this:
And of course neither branch was hit, because this is C, and the uninitialized x was neither 0 nor 1, but some other random value.