Comment by adestefan

12 years ago

sizeof is a unary operator and not a function. Only types need to be enclosed in parens. Most people don't know this.

Exactly! For some reason this anti-pattern is very thoroughly entrenched among C programmers and it's so very frustrating.

My other favorite is casting the return value of malloc(), something you see a great deal of and that I always oppose. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/605845/do-i-cast-the-resu... for my best arguments.

  • Casting the return value of malloc is necessary in C++. I think that's why it's so widespread, so you can compile your C program with a C++ compiler.