> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mikhail Teterin [SMTP:m...@misha.cisco.com]
> Sent: Monday, February 01, 1999 9:41 PM
> To: curr...@freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: btokup().. patch to STYLE(9) (fwd)
>
> =Whilst the official codebase may be under the control of a select
> =group of committers, the code should be capable of being understood
> by
> =anyone who is reasonably proficient with C.
>
> Depends on your definition of "reasonably", Mr. Special Counselor...
[ML]
I see no cause for name calling.
A "Reasonably Proficient" programmer is the one who
writes correct code. The one who writes maintainable
correct code is "Very Proficient". The one who writes
well-documented maintainable correct code is a target
for a marriage proposal :)
Sadly, few proficient programmers program exclusively
in C/C++. Most of us have bills to pay and switch on
a drop of a hat from C to PL/I to COBOL to VisualBASIC
to Perl to FORTRAN to YouNameIt to ...
And, guess what, none of these languages have the same
operator precedence as C/C++. But they all have
parentheses. Knowledge of operator precedence as a
metric of programming proficience--ludicrous. My brain
would turn to pretzel if I had to know all the precedence
rules in all the languages that I daily have to use.
So, yes, I do use parentheses relying on assocciativity
only around addition/multiplication. Logical expressions
are handled differently in every language--some of them
do not even have short-circuiting logical operators--thus,
they will be parenthesized.
An example that was being thrown around would look like
this in my code:
/* the reason for branching */
if ( (a * b - c * d) < (e / f) ) {
true_part();
}
else {
false_part();
more_false_part();
}
You will have noticed that I put braces around single
statements. This has no performance penalty--a reasonable
compiler will not create a stack frame--and helps in
maintenance.
/* copy null-terminated b to a */
for (pa = a, pb = b; (*pa = *pb) != 0; ++pa, ++pb) {
/* NOTHING */
}
Same thing here--okay, so it is a bit more verbose than
absolutely neccessary. The advantage is that the people
who are not absolutely acquainted with the syntactical
finesse of the language *can* read it and can actually
*modify* it without undue hassle.
> That's what is being tirelessly debated for the last several days.
>
[ML] Hopefully we will come to agreement about a
reasonable metric for programmer proficiency (and
when I am at that, I can also hope for a jackpot in
lottery :)
/Marino
> -mi
>
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