Sure, if by "fairly recent" you mean at least more than twenty years ago:
The construct is a useful idiom, but oftentimes there would be or ought to be a local coding standard recommending that you make what you're doing explicit by comparing the assignment result to the appropriate flavour of zero:
if ((foo = bar) != NULL)
In my case, at least one of the compilers in question was for the 8051, the platform that won't fucking die. Due to the peculiarities of the aforementioned piece of silicon crap, the compiler was not entirely ANSI-compliant (various #pragmas were actually required to produce working code, indicating various parameters related to memory organisation and the such), thus making it rather difficult to compile the codebase with anything but that particular compiler.
> The construct is a useful idiom, but oftentimes there would be or ought to be a local coding standard recommending that you make what you're doing explicit by comparing the assignment result to the appropriate flavour of zero
This is the solution I adhere to as well.