Regarding assignment to struct

Back in the days of K&R, Kernighan and Ritchie published an addendum
to the "C Reference Manual" titled "Recent Changes to C" (November 1978)
in which they detailed some differences in the C language post "The
C Programming Language".

The first difference they noted was that
  "Structures may be assigned, passed as arguments to functions, and
   returned by functions."

From what I can see of the ISO C standards, the current C language
has kept these these features. However, I don't see many C projects
using them.

I have a project in which these capabilities might come in handy; has
anyone had experience with assigning to structures, passing them as
arguments to functions, and/or having a function return a structure?

Would code like
  struct ab {
    int a;
    char *b;
  } result, function(void);

  if ((result = function()).a == 10) puts(result.b);

be understandable, or even legal?


--
Lew Pitcher
"In Skills We Trust"