Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 20:01:23 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Sheldon Hearn <axl@iafrica.com> Cc: Mikhail Teterin <mi@kot.ne.mediaone.net>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: btokup().. patch to STYLE(9) (fwd) Message-ID: <19990129200123.I8473@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <88592.917598420@axl.noc.iafrica.com>; from Sheldon Hearn on Fri, Jan 29, 1999 at 10:27:00AM %2B0200 References: <199901290555.AAA28927@kot.ne.mediaone.net> <88592.917598420@axl.noc.iafrica.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Friday, 29 January 1999 at 10:27:00 +0200, Sheldon Hearn wrote: > On Fri, 29 Jan 1999 00:55:21 EST, Mikhail Teterin wrote: >> Everybody's goal is to keep/make code readable (accusations of "trying >> to obfuscate" are silly). You, people, are just not agreeing what >> "readable" means. Hoping to aid in the ending of this thread(s), > > Thank you very much. This is _exactly_ the point here. > > As far as I see it, there are a lot of people who are saying > > "I want to use parens to improve readability" > > when what they really mean is > > "I want to use parens to obviate the need to learn operator precedence." I suppose that depends on whether you consider the code write-only or read-write. > I can't imagine how unnecessary parens are going to improve > "readability" for anyone who knows his/her operator precedence. What about the others? > What it does is allow folks who aren't sure about what they're doing > to get around doing things properly. Remember, we're not talking about the writer now, we're talking about the reader, who in the general case is not the same person. To quote ``Design and implementation'': Documentation is the castor oil of programming. Managers know it must be good because the programmers hate it so much. Adding the occasional superfluous brace or paren pair can help a lot there. And if superfluous parens are so bad, explain why the kernel is full of things like: return (error); Greg -- See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19990129200123.I8473>