Coding style of “if” statements [duplicate]

Answer 1

This is called "Yoda-Style" (or "Yoda conditions" or "Yoda notation") and should prevent you from accidentally writing

if (bar = MY_CONSTANT) {
    /*  then do something */
}

since

if (MY_CONSTANT = bar) {
    /*  then do something */
}

would trigger a compiler error.

The name is derived from the uncommon twisted sentence construction the Star Wars character Yoda is also using.

In my opinion using "Yoda-Style" makes understanding of code harder because it is against the normal sentence construction rules. Also code quality checker (or as mentioned in the comments maybe even the compiler itself) should complain about such assignments anyway, so that (imho) there is no good reason to obfuscate your code.

Answer 2

This is something of a best practice which someone thought best 15 years ago or so. Alleged benefit was that it would prevent someone from doing accidental assignments instead of comparison.

It was dubious back than, it is 100% moot nowadays since any compiler worth using will warn about assignment in branch operator, but hordes of lemmings still copy best practice without even thinking what it means or what it is for.