more on TRUE and FALSE (side-comment)

[Henry Spencer]

In article <quan.653570879 at sol> quan at sol.surv.utas.oz (Stephen Quan) writes:
>Personally I hate 'writing' programs with :
>
>  if (strcmp(name,"hippo")==0) ....

Agreed.  This is a *very* confusing convention, made all the worse by
pinheads who shorten it to `if (strcmp(a, b))' or `if (!strcmp(a, b))'
without considering what a nuisance this is to readers.  Our local
custom is to define a STREQ macro; the inequality comparisons are much
less troublesome (and much rarer) and don't really need the help.  My
current favorite definition is:

#define	STREQ(a, b)	(*(a) == *(b) && strcmp((a), (b)) == 0)

Note that this is an unsafe macro; on the other hand, it is typically
much faster than one which just calls strcmp every time.  Most string
comparisons fail on the first character.
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