On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 03:23:21PM +0200, Michael Matz wrote:
> > I don't see anything in Trevor's work that requires jumping through
> > hoops.
>
> Me neither, from that perspective it's okay. It's merely that I doubt the
> value of any syntactic privatization like it's implemented in C++, you can
> #define it away, hence the compiler can't make use of that information for
no, it can't make use of it if someone does something crazy like #define
it away which is atleast a little tricky because of the ':'. I believe
clang does infact make use of private to find unused fields (maybe it
does something else, but I can't imagine what that would be).
> code generation, and the cognitive value for the developer ("hey I
> shouldn't look at this member from outside") is dubious, as that probably
> is a general rule, no direct data member access from non-members (although
> I have problems with that too).
The value is that when you read code you *know* that something is only
used in certain places instead of hoping that is true.
> And I think the fact that Trevor made one data member non-private to
> access it from a non-member function (move_computations_dom_walker::todo)
> just underlines my point: private is useless and gets in the way.
It certainly shows a case where that's true, but it doesn't really show
that's always true.
> > > What's the benefit of reading and writing such noisy lines? :
> > >
> > > *out_mode = mode_;
> > > mode_ = GET_MODE_WIDER_MODE (mode_);
> > > count_++;
> >
> > It makes it very clear to the reader that we're dealing with objects that
> > belong to a class instance rather than direct access to an auto or static.
> > That can be important.
>
> this->x.
>
> From the wiki it seems that was dicussed (on the wiki, not the mailing
> list) and rejected by Lawrence on the grounds of indroducing too long
> lines. I agree with that, but I don't agree that therefore members should
> be named foo_.
this-> also has the disadvantage that you always have to rember it, and
fundimentally doesn't help you know where a member could possibly be
used.
Trev
>
> > Given it's recommended by our C++ guidelines which were discussed at
> > length, I'm going to explicitly NAK your patch.
>
> Hmmkay.
>
> > FWIW, I have worked on large C++ codebases
>
> Me too.
>
> > that were a free-for-all and found them *amazingly* painful.
>
> I don't think any of my mails about style can be interpreted as advocating
> free-for-all.
>
> > The restricted set allowed for GCC is actually quite reasonable IMHO,
> > particularly for projects where the main body of code is evolving from a
> > pure C base.
>
> Funnily it's the small things that weren't much discussed (probably
> because they are deemed not very important) in the convention that give
> me a hard time, nits such as these syntactic uglifications. The larger
> things indeed mostly are okayish.
>
>
> Ciao,
> Michael.
