On 9/11/13, Bart Massey <b...@cs.pdx.edu> wrote: > Well now I feel bad; I thought we had discussed this before and > everyone was OK with it. I should revert that patch now, I guess? My > sincere apologies for being premature. > > For the record, though, I totally and vehemently disagree with the > "bad style" argument. Separating definition from declaration is bad > style, because it makes it easier to use a variable before it has been > initialized. Whenever possible, variables should be declared at point > of first assignment, so that it is clear that they have been > initialized.(If you disagree, I challenge you to go back through old > code and see how many uninitialized-variable bugs would have been > easily caught by this convention--it will be lots.)
That's a really poor argument. Using that logic: Do you know how many off-by-one, buffer-overflow, double-free, etc. bugs could be prevented if use of pointers are removed? bah... --patrick > Further, said > definition should be as close as possible to the position of first > use. This allows one to easily see the definition when trying to > understand the code that uses the variable: a big aid to debugging and > analysis. > > I know of no plausible SE case for declaring variables way up at the > top of the block they are defined in other than tradition. It was > originally done that way to make it easier for Fortran compilers, > AFAIK. It's error-prone and makes code harder to read: it's a > tradition we should enthusiastically abandon. > > --Bart > > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Alan Coopersmith > <alan.coopersm...@oracle.com> wrote: >> On 09/11/13 08:52 PM, Daniel Stone wrote: >>> >>> Hi, >>> >>> On 11 September 2013 17:31, Mark Kettenis <mark.kette...@xs4all.nl> >>> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> From: Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersm...@oracle.com> >>>>> Pushing the patch is easy - determining if it's our consensus to >>>>> change >>>>> the X.Org coding style to allow this is the hard part. >>>>> >>>>> Does anyone object to allowing this change to the coding style now >>>>> that >>>>> it's no longer a hard requirement for OpenBSD's ports? >>>> >>>> >>>> It's still bad style. >>> >>> >>> Yeah, I actually totally agree. >> >> >> The one bit I would like to have is declarations in for/while loops, such >> as >> for (int i = 0; i < MAXSCREENS; i++) >> >> Having declarations in the middle of code blocks I can live without, >> though >> in a few cases it would reduce the complexity of our #ifdef nesting. >> >> >> -- >> -Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersm...@oracle.com >> Oracle Solaris Engineering - http://blogs.oracle.com/alanc >> _______________________________________________ >> xorg-devel@lists.x.org: X.Org development >> Archives: http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel >> Info: http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-devel > _______________________________________________ > xorg-devel@lists.x.org: X.Org development > Archives: http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel > Info: http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-devel > _______________________________________________ xorg-devel@lists.x.org: X.Org development Archives: http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel Info: http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-devel