You nailed it. Standards are nice and all, when they're perfectly unambiguous, and when everyone follows them exactly. That is not the real world. Writing code clearly and explicitly has far more reward for the effort put into it than learning all the standards pedantically.
Re:Deep C and C++ (2011)
by devcjohnson on Wednesday October 23, 2013 @01:58PM
(#6600460)
Me too reply...
Don't get cute and always prefer to explicitly state in code what you get for free implicitly. The maintenance guy that follows behind you will be the one to espouse how clever you actually are. That's how I mentor junior engineers as a general rule.
If I see
in code, I'm going to change it to even if I know that static integers are initialized to 0 in the standard, because I know that eventually someone will have to maintain the code who doesn't know that. I don't particularly care what the standard says there: the code shouldn't assume detailed understanding of the standard, which isn't realistically a valid assumption.