--index or index--

[booogt]

quick question...prolly a fast answer but here goes...why would code be this:

 buffer[index - bufIndex] = '\0';
--index;

instead of:

 buffer[index-- - bufIndex] = '\0';

because my understanding is that the later is the same thing as the first...

thanks for the help

- nc

[s. roelants]

Just some thoughts:

I myself tend to put those things on several lines, for readability and for debugging purposes.
Now you can put a breakpoint on each line, or watch more closely what happens.

The compiler optimizes these things anyway (if you want), so there is no performance problem anyhow.

This is not a to difficult thing, but i've seen monsters of expressions that would take me a long time to figure out. Mostly had to take a look at them because they where wrong!!

i'm also in the habbit of using a lot of parenthesis, such that i'm really sure that the operators are evaluated exactly the way i want.

I once read (at school still, i think) that operator precedence is dependent on the compiler. Therefor i make sure the statement will be always evaluated the same.

Hope this clears it up a bit,

Steven Roelants

[billwilson3]

Yep they do the same thing.

[booogt]

ok thats what i thought and i figured that it was set up that way for readability but i'm a java programmer now and i'm teaching myself VC++/C++/C with some breif knowledge of ASM and my knowledge of Java it's made my transition MUCH easier but i want to be sure that things will do the same thing...
You are right about the parens thing as well...i use parens all the time specially with C++ and pointers<crucial to>
anyway...
thanks for the help

- nc