Comparison in variable assignment

Question

Sorry if it's a stupid question, but I couldn't find much information. I just want to assign the result of a comparison in a variable, like this:

int a = 3, b = 2; // In actual code they're not integer literals
int result = a > b;

When compiling, gcc (with -Wall) doesn't complain, and looking at the assembly output I found it's translated to cmp and setle (or setg etc.). I'm wondering whether it's invalid (C) code or considered bad practice, since I see it's never used.

Answer 1

This is a perfectly valid C code. The behavior is detailed in section 6.5.8.6 of the C99 standard:

Each of the operators < (less than), > (greater than), <= (less than or equal to), and >= (greater than or equal to) shall yield 1 if the specified relation is true and 0 if it is false. The result has type int.

Unless you are maintaining legacy code that must be compatible with pre-C99 compilers, consider using <stdbool.h> and bool type instead of an int.