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    For this very reason, a C++ project I worked on for some medical device software had a coding standard which mandated == false instead of ! for this same reason (to make it stand out). However there was no requirement to use == true, so any non-zero value still worked as it should. Commented Feb 26, 2012 at 0:43
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    I've always found this argument unconvincing - there are other places in C/C++/C#/Java/etc where failing to see a single character has a similarly significant impact on the interpretation of the code; singling out "!" as the only bad one doesn't make sense to me. Commented Feb 27, 2012 at 8:18
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    @bevan Apparently you have not been bitten yet. Commented Feb 27, 2012 at 11:46
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    While I agree that overlooking ! is probably the most troublesome mistake of this kind, this should IMO not give rise to making a habit of writing ==false but of writing better unit tests. Commented Feb 27, 2012 at 13:04
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    @ThorbjørnRavnAndersen Quite the reverse - I've been bitten often enough over the years that I've taught myself to read every character. I'm not the author of all (or even most) of the code I have to read day to day, so any personal convention as we're discussing here has minimal value: I need to correctly understand all the code I read, not just the stuff I've written. Commented Feb 27, 2012 at 18:00