c - Why does strcmp() return 0 when its inputs are equal?

Question

When I make a call to the C string compare function like this:

strcmp("time","time")

It returns 0, which implies that the strings are not equal.

Can anyone tell me why C implementations seem to do this? I would think it would return a non-zero value if equal. I am curious to the reasons I am seeing this behavior.

Answer 1

strcmp returns a lexical difference (or should i call it "short-circuit serial byte comparator" ? :-) ) of the two strings you have given as parameters. 0 means that both strings are equal

A positive value means that s1 would be after s2 in a dictionary.

A negative value means that s1 would be before s2 in a dictionary.

Hence your non-zero value when comparing "time" and "money" which are obviously different, even though one would say that time is money ! :-)