On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 5:42 AM, Στέφανος Σωφρονίου <stefanossofroniou...@gmail.com> wrote: > Greetings everyone. > > I have noticed that in many if conditions the following syntax is used: > > a) if (variable == NULL) { ... } > b) if (variable == -1) { ... } > c) if (variable != NULL) { ... } > > What I wanted to ask is, is there a particular reason for not choosing > > a) if (!variable) { ... } in place of if (variable == NULL) { ... }, > b) if (-1 == variable) { ... } in place of if (variable == -1) { ... }, and > c) if (variable) { ... } in place of if (variable) { ... } ? > > Especially the (b) syntax is extremely dangerous to assign -1 to variable in > case of an accidental mistyping of equals sign; it had happened countless > times by now to to many of us that use various C-family languages. > > Is there a particular reason for using this specific coding style?
Have you read PEP 7? https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0007/ PEP 7 and PEP 8 are a pair of style guides that govern the CPython source code - PEP 7 for the C code, and PEP 8 for the Python code in the standard library. Unfortunately, many people seem to think that PEP 8 is supposed to govern *their* code, and as such, end up not even realizing that PEP 7 exists to answer all the same sorts of questions. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list