I don't know where you got this idea, and it seems to be the root
of your misconception, but C has no such mechanism for "testing
if the assignment occurred." Assignment returns the value
assigned to the left operand, not a truth value indicating
whether the assignment occurred or not. The standard is quite
clear about this. If you say
if (left = right)
and 'right' is 0, then 0 is assigned to 'left' and the value of
the expression 'left = right' is 0, which the 'if' then regards
as false per the C rule that zero is false and non-zero is true.
Otherwise the commonly-used (and generally considered to be
stylistically valid) construct "a = b = c = d = 0" would not
behave as expected. If you don't believe me, try it in your
favorite standard-compliant C compiler.
Your lint tool is right to complain about using 'a=b' alone in a
conditional context on stylistic grounds, and I would generally
avoid using such a construct or recommending that anyone else use
it, but the point is that it is syntactically and semantically
valid C by both the K&R and ANSI standards, and your stated
interpretation of the behavior of the construct is wrong and
misleading.
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