Weird problem with if statements

[jdong]

Someone who's studied C++ Operator Overloading could tell you that the equals operator has similar to the following declaration:

int & operator=(int & left_hand_side, int & right_hand_side)

That is, the assignment operator returns a reference to the assigned value, allowing chaining (I think a better term) of assignments. As long as you assign a non-zero number, this statement will evaluate to TRUE. Definitely not the behavior you want....

Good for cheats, like assigning a NULL pointer within an IF statement would return FALSE, causing the block of code to be skipped. Good for experts, nightmare for beginners.