Re: [PATCH RFC] Codingstyle: allow omitting braces for all singlestatement branches

From: Stefan Richter
Date: Thu Nov 26 2009 - 11:12:12 EST


Uwe Kleine-KÃnig wrote:
> Grepping for "} else$" in v2.6.32-rc8 yields 6440 hits. So this seems
> to be common practice and should be allowed.

Flawed reasoning. Is this in new and otherwise stylistically
well-written code? Or did you perhaps grep in old code or even in staging?

> checkpatch doesn't warn about both variants.

What checkpatch does/ can do, or doesn't, is only indirectly related to
good style or canonical style.

> --- a/Documentation/CodingStyle
> +++ b/Documentation/CodingStyle
> @@ -168,15 +168,23 @@ Do not unnecessarily use braces where a single statement will do.
> if (condition)
> action();
>
> -This does not apply if one branch of a conditional statement is a single
> -statement. Use braces in both branches.
> -
> -if (condition) {
> - do_this();
> - do_that();
> -} else {
> - otherwise();
> -}
> +If not all branches of a conditional statement are single statements you might
> +use braces for both branches.
> +
> + if (condition) {
> + do_this();
> + do_that();
> + } else
> + otherwise();
> +
> +or
> +
> + if (condition) {
> + do_this();
> + do_that();
> + } else {
> + otherwise();
> + }
>
> 3.1: Spaces
>

Either don't remove the existing paragraph, or remove it --- but do not
add your new either-or paragraph. If you consider both variants to be
OK, you don't need to bloat the style guide by documenting them both.
There is no third or fourth alternative.
--
Stefan Richter
-=====-==--= =-== ==-=-
http://arcgraph.de/sr/
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