Lesser known tricks, quirks and features of C

Cool. Two of the tricks shown are from my contribution in stackoverflow.

Nice article. Saw a few things I wish I'd known about.

1. %n in printf would be handy when writing CLIs dealing w/ multiple lines or precise counts of backspaces.

2. Using enums as a form of static_assert() is a great idea (triggering a div by zero compiler error).

Fun fact about %n:

Mazda cars used to have a bug where they used printf(str) instead of printf("%s", str) and their media system would crash if you tried to play the "99% Invisible" podcast in them. All because the "% In" was parsed as a "%n" with some extra modifiers. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-...

> The 0 width field tells that the following bit fields should be set on the next atomic entity (char).

This isn't correct since int can't be less than 16-bits. Fields are placed on the nearest natural alignment for the target platform, which might not support unaligned access.

Here's another one. Handy "syntax" that makes it possible to iterate an unsigned type from N-1 to 0. (Normally this is tricky.)

for (unsigned int i = N; i --> 0;) printf("%d\n", i);

This --> construction also works in JavaScript and so on.