Derrick Stolee <stolee@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Well, I found 782 instances of ") < 0)" in the codebase, and my initial > scan of these shows they are doing exactly what you are asking. So as > far as code style goes, there is plenty of precedent. > > The thing that makes me react to this is that it _looks_ like an extra > comparison. However, I'm sure the assembly instructions have the same > performance characteristics between "!= 0" and "< 0". I'd prefer to keep it that way for the human cost's point of view. Perhaps it could be subjective but if (func_that_signals_error_with_return_value() < 0) is immediately recognizable as checking for an error to folks who were trained to write C in POSIX environment, as "on error, return negative" is a convention that they are familiar with. At least to me, your "if (func_that_signals_error_with_return_value())" looks unnatural and makes me look at the function to see what its return value means. If there are helper functions that use "non-zero is an error and zero is success" convention, we should look at them to see why they do not do the usual "a negative is an error and a non-negative is success". And if the *only* reason they do so is because their normal return do not have to give more than one kind of "success", we should see if we can fix them to follow the usual "a negative is an error" convention, I would think. Thanks.
