Bart Massey <[email protected]> writes: > 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.
Well, considering that it's already used in many places and that at least X server specifies some mandatory C extensions[0] (from [1]), including interleaved code and declarations, I don't see why this patch should be reverted... > 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 > 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. I agree. -- Arnaud Fontaine [0] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/tree/doc/c-extensions [1] http://www.x.org/wiki/CodingStyle/ _______________________________________________ [email protected]: X.Org development Archives: http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel Info: http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-devel
