superfluous code

johnmerlino (110)
In the below piece of code, there is a condition "if(wordlen > 0)". But it seems that the condition is not even needed, because if the previous character was a space, tab or newline, inspace will be set to 1, so that block which contains "if(wordlen > 0)" won't be executed during this iteration. And if that block is executed, then that means the previous iteration of the while loop had a character so wordlen must at least be equal to 1, since for each character its counter is incremented by 1. So is "if(wordlen > 0)" superfluous in the below definition?

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#define MAXWORDLEN 10

int main(void)
{
  int c;
  int inspace = 0;
  long lengtharr[MAXWORDLEN + 1];
  int wordlen = 0;

  int firstletter = 1;
  long thisval = 0;
  long maxval = 0;
  int thisidx = 0;
  int done = 0;

  for(thisidx = 0; thisidx <= MAXWORDLEN; thisidx++)
  {
    lengtharr[thisidx] = 0;
  }

  while(done == 0)
  {
    c = getchar();

    if(c == ' ' || c == '\t' || c == '\n' || c == EOF)
    {
      if(inspace == 0)
      {
        firstletter = 0;
        inspace = 1;

        if(wordlen <= MAXWORDLEN)
        {
          if(wordlen > 0)
          {
            thisval = ++lengtharr[wordlen - 1];
            if(thisval > maxval)
            {
              maxval = thisval;
            }
          }
        }
        else
        {
          thisval = ++lengtharr[MAXWORDLEN];
          if(thisval > maxval)
          {
            maxval = thisval;
          }
        }
      }
      if(c == EOF)
      {
        done = 1;
      }
    }
    else
    {
      if(inspace == 1 || firstletter == 1)
      {
        wordlen = 0;
        firstletter = 0;
        inspace = 0;
      }
      ++wordlen;
    }
  }

Last edited on
coder777 (8450)
So is "if(wordlen > 0)" superfluous in the below definition?
No, it's required because it is possible that wordlen is 0 on line 34 (at the very beginning) so that it would crash on line 36
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