Bernd Edlinger <[email protected]> writes:
>>> Using -- on a value that goes out of scope looks
>>> awkward IMHO.
>>
>> I don't understand this sentence. What do you mean by "Using -- on a
>> value that goes out of scope"?
>>
>
> I meant the operator -- in *line_len = --len;
Sorry, I don't see how that is an issue. This looks like a classical
way of passing an output parameter to me.
> Maybe, You could also avoid the copying completely, if you just hand out
> a pointer to the line buffer as const char*, and use the length instead of the
> nul-char as end delimiter ?
I thought about avoiding the copying of course. But the issue with that
is that that ties the lifetime of the returned line to the time between
two invocations of read_next_line. IOW, you'd have to use the line
"quickly" before calling read_next_line again. Actually that
non-copying API that you are talking about exists in the patch; it's
get_next_line. And you see that it's what we use when we want to avoid
the copying, e.g, in goto_next_line. But when we want to give the
"final" user the string, I believe that copying is less surprising. And
from what I could see from the tests I have done, the copying doesn't
make the thing slower than without the patch. So I'd like to keep this
unless folks have very strong feeling about it.
--
Dodji
