Hi Collin,
> Thanks! I got most of them in Coreutils, inspired by your changes [1].
Nice to see the coreutils becoming more readable too (by today's code
style habits).
> Semi-related, but did pre-standard C not allow initialize variables upon
> declaring them?
>
> See this code copied from Coreutils src/basename.c:
>
> static void
> remove_suffix (char *name, char const *suffix)
> {
> char *np;
> char const *sp;
>
> np = name + strlen (name);
> sp = suffix + strlen (suffix);
>
> [...]
> }
Already in pre-standard C, one could write
static void
remove_suffix (char *name, char const *suffix)
{
char *np = name + strlen (name);
char const *sp = suffix + strlen (suffix);
[...]
}
But if the programmer later wanted to add a statement between
the declarations, they couldn't write
char *np = name + strlen (name);
if (!suffix)
suffix = ".txt";
char const *sp = suffix + strlen (suffix);
because that would mix declarations and statements. They would
have had to write
char *np = name + strlen (name);
if (!suffix)
suffix = ".txt";
{
char const *sp = suffix + strlen (suffix);
But reindenting a block of code was not easy at that time:
- The editors were line oriented, not block-oriented.
- Additionally, GNU source code used tabs for indentation all
over the place.
Nowadays, people can use Emacs with M-x indent-rigidly, but
that was not commonplace before ca. 1990-1995.
And so the programmers settled on the "declare all local variables up-front"
coding style.
Bruno
