Common C Pitfalls

Some aspects of C that often trip up programmers:

• Complex operator precedence rules - use parentheses liberally

• Type casting can lead to unexpected behavior

• switch statements “fall through” cases - add break statements

• static means different things in local vs global scope

• Common bugs:

  • Forgetting break statements in switch blocks
  • Mismatched pointer types in casts
  • Misunderstanding order of increment/decrement operators
  • Undefined behavior from numerical overflow or invalid memory access