Why does a “function name” evaluate to true in C and how to get warned on it

Question

I recently stumbled across the following behaviour of gcc 3.2.2 writing a c program:

In an if statement I forgot the braces of a function and wrote:

if

Answer 1

myFunc, since its the name of a function will always evaluate to true because its a pointer. More specifically it has to be a non-null pointer because you will be needing to dereference it. A null pointer would evaluate to false.

In short, there does not seem to be a way for the compiler to tell you that you've made a mistake.

What you need to do is to have some unit tests that separately invoke the true and false responses so that you can tell that you've actually called the function.