Mehmet Ozan Ünal

Coolest C Trick

· Mehmet Ozan Ünal

Hello Everyone,

Just a quick post here…

Today I have seen a code snippet which makes me quite happy.

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
    int x = 10;
    while (x --> 0) // x goes to 0
    {
        printf("%d ", x);
    }
}

The the output of this is:

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

It was a little suprising for me at first sight. I thought that what the hell is --> operator. After then I understand that it is actually x-- and >. X compared with 0 (cheked if it is bigger than 0) and then it is decremented by 1. Therefore, this loop can be decoded to this:

    while (x > 0) // x goes to 0
    {
        x = x - 1;
        printf("%d ", x);
    }

After the mistery solved, I still like this approach. I am planning to use it in my code.

Hope to see you soon, again.