When I write a comparison statement I nearly always write it variable first, value second.

But this is a silly habit to have. It should be value first, variable second. This is often refered to as a Yoda condition. Due to the little green jedi's peculiar way of talking.

wiki/Yoda_conditions does a better job of explaining this than him.

Here is a quick example of how Yoda condtions work. Given the following statement:

if(age < 18) { /* you can't drink here */ }

The Yoda condition equivalent would be:

if(18 > age) { /* you can't drink here */ }

That looks odd to me, what is the advantage? Mostly it will catch an unwanted assignment.

Why bother?

Well look at this code:

if(animal = "dog") { /* wag tail */ }

This checks if the animal is a dog, and then does something.

Oh actually, no it doesn't. It assigns the value of animal to be "dog". Which is not what I wanted. But it's a mistake that wouldn't be imediately obvious to me either.

It's this sort of thing that Yoda conditions prevent. If I was to make that mistake using Yoda conditons. Then the following code would throw an error.

if("dog" = animal) { /* wag tail */ }

The error:

.\animal.c:12:10: error: assignment to expression with array type
   12 | if("dog" = animal) {
      |          ^

Now I don't have to debug my code and pull my hair out. The issue is clear, thanks Yoda.