Just an amateur C programmer looking for answers. My main inspirations
for code
style is K&R 2nd edition and I'm curious about the instructions in Plan
9's
style(6) manual page (for reference,
http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/6/style). I've
tried to think about the motivations, but not everything is as clear as
it
seems.
Going through style(6):
no white space before opening braces.
no white space after the keywords `if', `for', `while', etc.
This is unique to Plan 9, it seems. I can't come up with a reason --
both BSD
and Linux style use whitespace, and K&R does too, while Plan 9 doesn't.
Why?
no braces around single-line blocks (e.g., `if', `for', and `while'
bodies).
Apologies, but I'll have to Go and do it anyway :)
automatic variables (local variables inside a function) are never
initialized at declaration.
Why not? In order to reduce visual clutter? It seems like this should be
handled
case-by-case: in some situations this just wastes lines:
int foo;
foo = 12;
func("blah", &foo);
follow the standard idioms: use `x < 0' not `0 > x', etc.
I'm guessing this is for consistency and more common coincidence with
the flow
of spoken language.
don't write `!strcmp' (nor `!memcmp', etc.) nor `if(memcmp(a, b, c))';
always
explicitly compare the result of string or memory comparison with zero
using a
relational operator.
Was that a common programmer error? cmp functions should return 0 if the
arguments are identical. Smells like disaster in baking!
and this is not an exhaustive list
Is there anything missing?
That's all. Thanks for your time.
