RE: function prototype element ordering

[David Laight]

From: Linus Torvalds
> Sent: 26 September 2021 22:04
> 
> On Sat, Sep 25, 2021 at 12:40 PM David Laight <David.Laight@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > If the function name starts at the beginning of a line it is
> > much easier to grep for the definition.
> 
> That has always been a completely bogus argument. I grep to look up
> the type as often as I grep for the function definition, plus it's not
> at all unlikely that the "function" is actually a macro wrapper, so
> grepping for the beginning of line is just completely wrong.
> 
> It's completely wrong for another reason too: it assumes a style of
> programming that has never actually been all that common. It's a very
> specific pattern to very specific projects, and anybody who learnt
> that pattern for their project is going to be completely lost anywhere
> else. So don't do it. It's just a bad idea.
> 
> So a broken "easier to grep for" is not an excuse for "make the code
> harder to read" particularly when it just makes another type of
> grepping harder, and it's not actually nearly universal enough to
> actually be a useful pattern in the first place.
> 
> It's not only never been the pattern in the kernel, but it's generally
> not been the pattern anywhere else either. It's literally one of the
> broken GNU coding standards - and the fact that almost every other
> part of the GNU coding standards were wrong (indentation, placement of
> braces, you name it) should give you a hint about how good _that_ one
> was.
> 
> Here's an exercise for you: go search for C coding examples on the
> web, and see how many of them do
> 
>     int main(int argc, char **argv)
> 
> vs how many of them do
> 
>     int
>     main(int argc, char **argv)

It makes a bigger difference with:

struct frobulate *find_frobulate(args)
which is going to need a line break somewhere.
Especially with the (strange) rule about aligning the continued
arguments with the (.

But I didn't expect such a long response :-)

I'm sure the netBSD tree (mostly) puts the function name in column 1.
But after that uses the K&R location for {} (as does Linux).

It true that a lot of 'coding standards' are horrid.
Putting '} else {' on one line is important when reading code.
Especially if the '}' would be at the bottom of the screen,
or worse still turning the page on a fan-fold paper listing to find
a floating 'else' = with no idea which 'if' it goes with.

The modern example of why { and } shouldn't be on their own lines is:
		...
	}
	while (...........................
	{
		...
Is that a loop bottom followed by a code block or
a conditional followed by a loop?

But none of this is related to the location of attributes unless
you need to split long lines and put the attribute before the
function name where you may need.

static struct frobulate *
__inline ....
find_frobulate(....)

Especially if you need #if around the attributes.

	David


	David

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