I have a function in a program that should return an int, but the return looks like this:
return wordlength > 6.0 && wordlength< 9.0
&& strcasestr (string, "substring1") && strcasestr (string, "substring2")
&& strcasestr (string, "substring2") && strcasestr (string, "substring4")
The wordlength is a double that contains the average length of the words in the string.
My question is what does the return statement actually return?
The operator precedence rules say that relational operators like < take precedence over &&. Therefore the sub-expression wordlength > 6.0 && wordlength< 9.0 is equivalent to (wordlength > 6.0) && (wordlength< 9.0).
Once that's sorted out, note that && has left-to-right associativity. Meaning that in case there are several of the same operator with the same precedence in the same expression, like for example a && b && c, then it is equivalent to (a && b) && c.
The logical operators like && has a "short-circuit" order of evaluation. Meaning that in 0 && b, only the operand 0 is evaluated/executed. See Is short-circuiting logical operators mandated? And evaluation order?
And finally, logically expressions in C do not yield a boolean type (like in C++) but an int of value 1 or 0. Even though the type is int, this can be regarded as if it is of type bool though, and you can safely write code such as bool b = x && y;.