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.

▲ furyofantares 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The most egregious one I saw, I was tracking down a bug and found code like this:

    bool x;

    ...

    if (x == true) {
        DoThing1();
    } else if (x == false) {
        DoThing2();
    }

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.

	▲	Rexxar 12 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Maybe it was initially supposed to be a sort of "3-value boolean" (true/false/undefined) and not a standard bool. You can (rarely) meet this pattern in c++ if you use boost::tribool or in c# if you have a nullable bool. There is probably similar thing in other languages.
	▲	tomjakubowski 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

▲ munchlax 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People do that? This hurts my brain. if(IsFoo(X)) is clear and readable.

▲ catlifeonmars 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Clearly the correct spelling is

`if(X&IsFooMask != 0)`