const and arrays

Qualifying a type with const may have some surprises. Consider the following

toto A = { 0 };
toto const* p = &A;

where toto is an opaque typedef that we don’t control. The question would be if the initialization of p is valid or not? From the way I pose that question, you have probably guessed the answer: it depends.

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Handling control flow inside macros

When people program macros that they want to be executed anywhere where a statement could be, they often use the

do {...} while(0)

construct. This construct has a big disadvantage in that it may change control flow in an unexpected way when you’d use it as a generic macro tool to collect statements: