On 2023-11-28 19:00, David Brown wrote:
> Can I ask (either or both of you) why you are using are using nested functions like
> this? This is possibly the first time I have heard of anyone using them, certainly
> the first time in embedded development. Even when I programmed in Pascal, where
> nested functions are part of the language, I did not use them more than a couple of
> times.
>
> What benefit do you see in nested functions in C, compared to having separate
> functions? Have you considered moving to C++ and using lambdas, which are more
> flexible, standard, and can be very much more efficient?
>
> This is, of course, straying from the topicality of this mailing list. But I am
> curious, and I doubt if I am the only one who is.
- I'm maintaining our token threaded forth interpreter. In the inner loop there is a
absurdly big switch for the primitives. I'm loading rp, sp and tos into local
variables. pushing, popping and memory access is done by nested functions (checking
for stack over and under flows, managing tos, access violations, ...). Of course that
could be done by macros. But when I'm calling C-functions from within the switch I'll
sometimes pass pointers to the local functions (e.g. for catch/throw exception handling).
- When calling list iterators, I'm sometimes passing references to nested functions
- When locking is necessary and the function has multiple return points I'm doing
something like:
void somefunction(void)
{
void f(void)
{
...
}
lock();
f();
unlock();
}
I know, in a lot of cases I could just define some outer static function or use
gotos. But to my eye it just looks nicer that way. In most cases there will be no
trampoline necessary anyway. Its not used that often and we could probably get rid of
it in most cases by using macros and ({ ... }).
regards, Matthias
