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    Very pithy ideology, but the fact remains that there's nothing wrong with assignment in conditionals. It's far preferable to early exit from a loop or duplicating code before and inside a loop. Commented Oct 29, 2016 at 20:31
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    @MilesRout There is. There is something wrong with any code having a side effect where you don't expect it, i.e. passing function arguments or evaluating conditionals. Not even mentionning that if (a=b) can easily be mistaken for if (a==b). Commented Oct 29, 2016 at 21:06
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    @Luke: "My IDE can clean up X, therefore it's not a problem" is rather unconvincing. If it's not a problem, why does the IDE make it so easy to "fix?" Commented Oct 30, 2016 at 5:32
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    @ArthurHavlicek I agree with your general point, but code with side effects in conditionals is really not so uncommon: while ((c = fgetc(file)) != EOF) as the first that comes to my mind. Commented Oct 30, 2016 at 5:59
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    +1 "Considering that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place, if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" B.W.Kernighan Commented Oct 31, 2016 at 20:24