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Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

A while back Indian companies were notoriously famous for giving questions from Let us C, from Yashwant Kanitkar.

The questions go like,

What is the output of the expression below?

    int i = 10;
    ****++&&*+p;

Followed by a myriad of options. Including things like Syntax error.

Not sure how this measures language proficiency.

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Ooof... I have done a few double pointers in my day *, but anything beyond that seems like bad practice!

> What is the output of the expression below?

> int i = 10;

> **++&&*+p;

> Followed by a myriad of options. Including things like Syntax error.

I consider myself fluent in C and to a lesser extent C++ -- that's a Syntax Error in C, at least.

This isn't a particularly difficult one to spot, but I can understand how it would be if you weren't very familiar the language.

They mix the correct ones and wrong ones in a way, in a time constrained situation.

Eventually your eyes will give being a lexical analyser.

My diskile of C and C++ were particularly due to such questions. Its always in C or C++ I see such convoluted questions

I've been working in C for most of my career and I've never heard of such questions. They're not in any textbook I'm familiar with. In fact they're incredibly pointless and irrelevant.

That probably explains a few things...

That's an easy one -- p is undefined. :)

(/me runs away)

I wonder how many Indians partake in the IOCCC [1].

[1]: https://www.ioccc.org/

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