Is using char as a bool in C bad practice?

Question

Is there any downside to using

typedef char bool;
enum boolean { false, true };

in C to provide a semantic boolean type?

Answer 1

The downside of typedef char bool; is that if you compile with a C99 implementation and happen to include , this ends up as typedef char _Bool;, which is wrong. Also, if you ever tried to compile the code as C++, you'd have issues (that's not necessarily a problem, but it could be).

It would probably better either to use if your implementation provides one or to use a different name for the type, like BOOL.