Funnily enough just spent a day tracking down a weird problem in an embedded system - some event timestamps were getting corrupted in a weird way. The pattern wasn't obvious until in desperation I dumped them in hex and found the second MSB was toggling between 0 and 1 (whereas it should have been been part of a count sequence). That told me exactly where to look - where the count was re-assembled from four bytes and I found this upstream (paraphrased):-
Having spent a lot of time digging into C code and doing microcontroller programming professionally, I have learned a certain disdain for the practice of using minimal whitespace in expressions, and the related practice of minimising LOC using C's very dense expressions syntax(unary dec/inc operators, the fact that assignment is itself an expression, etc).
The dense expressions syntax is pretty much a holdover from the time C was invented by Dennis Ritchie for the purpose of porting Unix; when it had to be typed on a painfully slow electromechanical teletype. This is also why most Unix commands are 2-4 characters long.
But it serves very little meaningful purpose today. It's important to remember that you might be able to turn 3 lines of code into 1, but it'll still be the same amount of machine code. And it will probably be harder to read, harder to change, and harder to reason about. And it can be a lot easier to miss some edgecase or even a typo like in this case. I have seen such a silly amount of off-by-one errors in C code due to some subtle misuse of unary increment/decrement that I stopped using those operators altogether. They don't improve your software in any meaningful way.
I've done the >> 0 thing to make it very clear what's going on, but I hadn't considered the * 8 construction. That's actually easier to comprehend at a glance because the numbers become less "magic". (8 and 16 are obvious to me, but 24 always has me second-guessing myself somewhere in the back of my mind)
Somewhat oddly even in C++, where bool is a distinct type, g++ doesn't have any warning for implicit bool to int conversion, although clang's clang-tidy "linter" tool does.
Nope, code was clean with -Wall on arm-9 compiler (i.e. gcc).
Interesting thought now you say that (no warning) - only found it because of seeing the pattern (apropos the article) and from that having a good idea what was causing it (knowing the int was assembled a byte at a time).
If I had a criticism of modern compilers, it's the blizzard of uninteresting warnings ("strncmp takes const char star, did you really mean to pass it unsigned char star") that make people want to not use -Wall.
