[andrewcooke]

but this - and other examples here - seem unfair, in that they are blaming _Bool for working correctly (consistently, logically) in cases where people were previously doing dumb things.

if you rely on something called "bool" being 0x02 you're going to have a bad time. that's hardly C99's fault.

your last line of code is what i would write, effectively, if i needed to compare booleans. it seems to me that _Bool is an improvement because, pre-C99, if i forgot the !! dance somewhere, i likely had a bug. with _Bool things just work.

(disclaimer, as with other reply here - still trying to get a grasp on this, so may be saying something stupid myself).

[mbell]

I don't really disagree, but Linus's point, which I agree with, is that C99's implementation is 'better' but is still pretty bad, i.e. 'bool' is still a mask for 'int' and as a result array's of bools aren't what they should be: bit arrays, directly serializing a bool is still sending out an entire int of data, etc. The 'improvement' in C99 isn't worth the broken code that will result from the subtle differences.

It's also worth considering in context that a lot of the code which will run into problems with these small differences is low level OS/driver code that often deals with a lot of bit flags and bit manipulation in general. When your trying to fit a web server into 3800 _bytes_ of ram on an 8 bit microcontroller, 'doing dumb things' becomes 'being inventive'.