2 style questions

[Sander]

1.
I was having a discussion with somebody and I think it's just religious.
We are developing some software and he was looking through my code.
I use if (pointer) to test a pointer for NULL. He says it must be if
(p!=NULL).
The arguments are that it's more readable and that if (p) is not portable.
I said the first is a style issue and that I think if(p) is more readable
and that the second is plain wrong.

So, is he right about the portability issue? is if (p) not strictly correct
C code?

2.
Then I started looking through his code and what I noticed that he very
often does things like this:

char *func(char **out)
{
*out = malloc(100);
return malloc(10);
}

This might also be a style issue, but it's a style where it's very easy to
introduce bugs (and indeed I found a few)
and even more easy to introduce bugs if you don't know the internals of the
function. So, what do you think about this style?

[Kevin Goodsell]

CBFalconer wrote:

iso646 has been part of C90 since at least 1995, and possibly
1990. My point is that it is easy to miss the existence of the !
in an expression, while much harder to ignore the "not".

For the record, the header <ios646.h> which contains the macro 'not' was
added with Normative Addendum 1, completed in 1994 and finally accepted
in 1995.

-Kevin
--
My email address is valid, but changes periodically.
To contact me please use the address from a recent posting.

[Kevin Goodsell]

Kevin Goodsell wrote:

CBFalconer wrote:

iso646 has been part of C90 since at least 1995, and possibly
1990. My point is that it is easy to miss the existence of the !
in an expression, while much harder to ignore the "not".

For the record, the header <ios646.h>...

That should have been <iso646.h>, of course.

-Kevin
--
My email address is valid, but changes periodically.
To contact me please use the address from a recent posting.

[Richard Heathfield]

Kevin Goodsell wrote:

Kevin Goodsell wrote:

For the record, the header <ios646.h>...

That should have been <iso646.h>, of course.

Have you been programming in C++ recently, or is that just my nasty
suspicious mind working overtime?

--
Richard Heathfield : bi****@eton.powernet.co.uk
"Usenet is a strange place." - Dennis M Ritchie, 29 July 1999.
C FAQ: http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html
K&R answers, C books, etc: http://users.powernet.co.uk/eton

[Kevin Goodsell]

Richard Heathfield wrote:

Kevin Goodsell wrote:

Kevin Goodsell wrote:

For the record, the header <ios646.h>...

That should have been <iso646.h>, of course.

Have you been programming in C++ recently, or is that just my nasty
suspicious mind working overtime?

Actually I haven't been lately, but I do a lot. 'ios' is firmly
ingrained in my mind.

-Kevin
--
My email address is valid, but changes periodically.
To contact me please use the address from a recent posting.

[Flash Gordon]

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 11:21:00 GMT
CBFalconer <cb********@yahoo.com> wrote:

Flash Gordon wrote:

CBFalconer <cb********@yahoo.com> wrote:

... snip ...

Another possibility:

#include <iso646.h>
....
if (not p)

This I would not go for because it limits portability to
implementations implementing ISO646, but I would not have any
difficulty reading it. I find
if (p)
if (!p)

iso646 has been part of C90 since at least 1995, and possibly
1990. My point is that it is easy to miss the existence of the !
in an expression, while much harder to ignore the "not".

You learn something new every day. My excuse is that I learnt from K&R2
and I can't see it in there.
--
Flash Gordon
Paid to be a Geek & a Senior Software Developer
Although my email address says spam, it is real and I read it.