Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2002 08:34:04 +0100 From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> To: "Mike Meyer" <mwm-dated-1015831171.a21ab0@mired.org> Cc: obrien@FreeBSD.ORG, Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@FreeBSD.ORG>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: RFC: style(9) isn't explicit about booleans for testing. Message-ID: <88752.1015400044@critter.freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 06 Mar 2002 01:19:31 CST." <15493.49923.458997.98416@guru.mired.org>
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In message <15493.49923.458997.98416@guru.mired.org>, "Mike Meyer" writes:
>David O'Brien <obrien@freebsd.org> types:
>> On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 02:08:07AM +0200, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>> I was giving one. :-)
>> style(9) documents the practices of /sys. Thus we should not arbitaryly
>> add rules w/o them being backed up in code.
>
>As the original author of the PR, I'll point out that this chagne does
>*not* add rules. It clarifies the wording of a rule that's already
>there. If the rule is wrong, it should be removed. The reason I didn't
>post if for wider review was because it wasn't changing any rules. My
>thanks to Giorgos for moving this PR towards closure.
I had a discussion with Eric Allman about this very thing recently
where he advocated "everything inside if, while, for and so on should
be true booleans".
Now, IFF the C language had a type called "boolean" that would make
a lot of sense.
Unfortunately, it does not (at present ?) have a boolean type, and
while one could simulate it with typedefs, there is no way to get
the compiler to enforce the rule.
I belive the overall purpose of style(9) is to make the code readable,
and I happen to think that
if (somerandomfunction(argthis, functionthat(something), onemore)) {
chugchugchug(argthisa;
}
is just a tiny bit more readable than
if ((somerandomfunction(argthis, functionthat(something), onemore)
!= 0) {
chugchugchug(argthisa;
}
for instance.
--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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