On 09/11/2013 10:55 PM, Bart Massey 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
They should also be declared const whenever possible IMO, though nobody
else seems to care about that. Having to separate the declaration and
initialization for artificial language reasons precludes that.
code and see how many uninitialized-variable bugs would have been
easily caught by this convention--it will be lots.) 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
--
Aaron
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