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Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine actually encountered #define FALSE 1 in some header file he included from a 3rd party project. It was straight C.

I'm not sure why after finding that he decided to file a bug report rather that not touch any of that code.

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#define FALSE 1 is not that uncommon in C because C in its infinite wisdom doesn't have true/false literals so people have to invent those by themselves.

Glib goes into great lengths to avoid namespace conflicts so it defines the GBoolean type and G_TRUE/G_FALSE. Whether that really is better than #define TRUE/FALSE, I don't know.

#define FALSE 0 is the common one

Doh, you're right. I had '#define FALSE 0' in my mind. '#define FALSE 1' actually is insane.

It actually defines TRUE and FALSE, and not G_TRUE/G_FALSE. But it does indeed define the gboolean type - it does make code easier to read.

People don't have to invent them, and it's generally annoying as hell when they chose to.

So then what are they supposed to do, require a library X which has already invented them, while your app is using library Y which already does the same thing as X?

Use 0 and 1, like everyone else. Those #defines are just meaningless syntactical sugar that get in the way.

In C99 #include <stdbool.h> has the type bool and the constants true and false (even in the "freestanding" flavor). Of course this doesn't save you if you are dealing with old/non-conformant compilers and/or legacy codebases.

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