Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 19:17:50 -0600 From: "Jacques A. Vidrine" <n@nectar.cc> To: chuck rouillard <chuckr@opus.sandiegoca.ncr.com> Cc: Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>, freebsd-standards@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: pathchk Message-ID: <20020201011750.GB91199@madman.nectar.cc> In-Reply-To: <20020131135842.A96280-100000@opus.sandiegoca.ncr.com> References: <200201302216.g0UMG1Y64367@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <20020131135842.A96280-100000@opus.sandiegoca.ncr.com>
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On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 03:27:16PM -0800, chuck rouillard wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Garrett Wollman wrote:
> > I am of the opinion that it is silly. Other reasonable people
> > disagree. (I happen to think that their reasons for disagreement are
> > the result of inadequate tools, and the appropriate response is to fix
> > the tool, not kluge up the source code.)
>
> Agreed, but given the number such casts currently
> peppered about in the source tree, and maybe some
> of the recent arguments for __P() on -arch, should
> this practice be continued?
>
> I wouldn't mind hearing additional comments on
> this topic since I have other things I'd like
> contribute.
Just a personal opinion, but:
If a function returns a value that is useful, but you consciously
choose to ignore it, I find the `(void)' cast a welcome indicator of
that conscious decision. For example, whenever I see code using
snprintf(), I always examine what is being done with the return value
--- the return value is typically used to detect truncation or advance
an offset within a buffer. The difference between these two pieces of
code:
snprintf(buf, "%x%y%z%z%y\a\a\n", foo, bar, baz, baz, bar);
and
(void)snprintf(buf, "%x%y%z%z%y\a\a\n", foo, bar, baz, baz, bar);
is that I don't have to wonder whether truncation was considered,
particularly if I wrote the code in question :-)
I don't mind the cast on functions where the return value is usually
useless (i.e. fprintf), but I don't generally use them myself.
Cheers,
--
Jacques A. Vidrine <n@nectar.cc> http://www.nectar.cc/
NTT/Verio SME . FreeBSD UNIX . Heimdal Kerberos
jvidrine@verio.net . nectar@FreeBSD.org . nectar@kth.se
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