Useless use of a (constant|hash element) in void context?

[ADFH]

> Are you a C programmer by chance?

Sort of :) .. not that good though...

Started with BASIC in 1983 (Dad bought a TRaSh-80 and made the mistake
                            of leaving the manual out)..
Some ASM in 1988 or so (only way to make sound on an Apple IIe - peeking
                        and poking special memory address at frequency
                        required - VERY clunky.. Oh yeah, and poke 1011,60
                        made Ctrl+Break reset the machine I think - that or
                        it changed text mode colours on CoCo 3 :) )
DOS/4DOS batch files in 1994.. (200+ line autoexec with program menu system,
                                logins, permissions etc. etc. :) .. the first
                                time I installed Windows, I removed it soon
                                after and went back to WordStar, QuattroPro and
                                DisplayWrite [Mrmm... EBCDIC])
C++ in 1996..
MC68HC11/i808x ASM in 1996..
Java in 1998..
C in 1999-2000..
Perl some time between 1998 and now..
(Can you spot the engineering and comp. sci course? :))

By no means prolific in C/C++ - I HATE malloc/dealloc stuff, null
terminating strings and having to calculate the length of stuff and
remembering to do explicit garbage collection etc. :) Even worse at ASM
:) (can't even remember it)

Basically a lot of the stuff I end up doing these days is in Perl, bash
or Java. Somewhere between developer and sysadmin one job - ISP helpdesk
on another :) .. Had no real "goto free" programming teaching until
university in '96.

My preferred platform these days is Debian GNU/Linux (especially after
Win2K file encryption when awry on me, and of all the files it decided
to lose, it lost its decryption keys ;-) )