On 11/16/2015 01:15 PM, Pedro Alves wrote:
Hi Jeff,
(Sorry I didn't reply sooner, I was OOO.)
No worries.
Boolean params are best avoided if possible, IMO. In this case,
it seems this could instead be a new wrapper function, like:
This hasn't been something we've required for GCC. I've come across
this recommendation a few times over the last several months as I
continue to look at refactoring and best practices for codebases such as
GCC.
FWIW, GDB is in progress of converting to C++ and we're pulling in
GCC's C++ conventions as reference, so I thought I'd see what the GCC
community thought here.
FWIW, I often look at GCC's conventions, google's conventions, then
start doing google searches around this kind of stuff. And as always,
the quality of the latter can vary wildly :-)
By encoding the boolean in the function's signature, it (IMHO) does make
the code a bit easier to read, primarily because you don't have to go
lookup the tense of the boolean). The problem is when the boolean is
telling us some property an argument, but there's more than one argument
and other similar situations.
There's more than one way to avoid boolean parameters.
If you have more than one of those, the boolean trap is even
worse IMO. In such cases, enums can help make things clearer for
the reader. E.g.:
foo (true, false);
foo (false, true);
vs:
foo (whatever::value1, bar::in_style);
Yea, I saw the latter at some point as well. In general I don't think
we've used enums as well as we could/should have in GCC through the years.
I think that internal helper functions defined close to
their usage end up being OK to use booleans, while if you have
a API consumed by other modules it pays off more to try to
avoid the boolean trap.
Anyway, sorry for the noise. I know there are bigger fish to fry.
Not noise at all -- no need to apologize.
jeff
