Explanation for this function's output

Question

I am doing review questions which ask me "What is the output of the following," and I am having some trouble understanding something about this function:

int a = 1, b = 1, c = -1;
c = --a && b++;
printf("%d %d %d", a, b, c);

The output is 010. My question is about line 2, c = --a && b++. How is this line processed, and how does it work/change the values? And if it were c = --a || b++? From my understanding I thought the output would be 020.

Answer 1

The key concept to understanding the result is short-circuit evaluation of Boolean operators (&& and ||) -- if, after evaluating the left-hand side of a Boolean operator, the value of the right-hand side cannot affect the overall result, then it will not be evaluated and any side-effects it would produce will not happen.

In the first case, since --a evaluates to 0 (=false) the second part of ... && ... is not evaluated, since "false AND anything" will always be false. Specifically, b++ is never executed, and so its value remains 1 in the output.

In the case of --a || b++, the value of the whole expression cannot be determined by the left-hand side ("false OR something" can still be true) so the b++ is evaluated (and it's side-effect, incrementing b, happens).

The other concept needed to fully understand the results is the difference between pre- and post-increment/decrement operators. If the -- or ++ appears before the variable (as in --a) then the variable is decremented or incremented first and new value is used to evaluate the whole expression. If the -- or ++ appears after the variable (as in b++) then the current value of the variable is used to evaluate the expression and the increment/decrement happens after this has happened.

It should be noted that expressions that try to combine two or more instances of --/++ of the same variable (e.g. a++ + ++a) are quite likely to invoke undefined behaviour -- the result may vary by platform, compiler, compiler and even the time of day.

Answer 2

In the expression c = --a && b++, a gets decreased and returned. Now the second argument of the expression --a && b++ is not evaluated because of short circuit evaluation---once we see that --a==0 we already know that the expression will be 0 regardless of what is the other argument---, so b remains unchanged.

Decreased a is 0 and b remains 1.

The output is, as you suggest, 0 1 0.

Regarding the second question, if you write c = --a || b++, the variable a again goes to zero but the expression can still evaluate to true---we must thus evaluate the second part as well, thus executing b++ which returns 1 and increases b. In this case the output would be 0 2 1, because c is assigned the value of 0 || 1 which is 1.

In short, read up on

• pre- and post-increment in C and C++ and on
• short circuit evaluation.