Booleans

Doing boolean logic in C is a little weird. There are, for example, no explicitly boolean variables -- instead, C represents 'TRUE' and 'FALSE' as the integers 1 and 0, respectively. In fact, any integer other than 0 is 'TRUE' in the context of a boolean operator. Personally, I've always believed that this is because C was created in the early 70s, when almost everything was true. Anyway. Carrying on.

Programmers are notoriously lazy people; C programmers even more so. Often, you will encounter really, really weird boolean logic in C, where a programmer has taken advantage of C's everything-not-zero-is-true rule in some clever (and highly confusing) fashion. As an example, let's try to puzzle out the value of result in this code:

  int result;

  if( (1 >= 2) || 7 )
    result = 42;
  else
    result = 114;

  printf("%d\n",result); // Prints ???

The interesting bit is that if expression. The computer first evaluates the left-hand side of the ||, so let's start with that. Greater-than-or-equal (>=) is a relational operator; it takes two values of the same type and returns a boolean. In this case, it takes two integers (1 and 2) and returns FALSE, since 1 is not, in fact, greater than 2. But remember, in C FALSE is 0. So that if is essentially the same as:

  int result;

  if( 0 || 7 )
    result = 42;
  else
    result = 114;

  printf("%d\n",result); // Prints ???

Since the left hand side was false (0), we have to evaluate the right hand side to determine if the expression is true ("left or right"). If the left hand side had been true (1), C would have skipped the right hand side altogether, not even executing the code there. This is called short-circuit evaluation, and it is as powerful as it is confusing.

In C, remember, anything that isn't 0 is TRUE, so 7 is TRUE, giving us:

  int result;

  if( 0 || 1 )
    result = 42;
  else
    result = 114;

  printf("%d\n",result); // Prints ???

Since an or (||) is true if either the left hand or the right hand side (or both!) is true, the entire expression evaluates as TRUE (1), and result is set to 42.

A Trick

Since people don't normally think about true and false as integers when they're doing logic, most C programmers use a simple trick to add boolean types to C. Add these three lines to the header of your C program:

#define TRUE 1
#define FALSE 0
typedef int bool;

This defines a variable type called bool and two values, TRUE and FALSE. When you compile your program the compiler will translate all your boolean variables into integers, and all your TRUE and FALSE values into the appropriate integer values. To use your new bool type:

// ...meanwhile, in main()...
bool lies_about_my_mother = FALSE;

if( FALSE )
  // We will never get here

if( TRUE || FALSE )
  // We will always get here

if( lies_about_my_mother)
  // Act!

-- TrevorFountain - 05 Dec 2008