On Fri, 5 Oct 2007, Sam Ravnborg wrote:
>
> Took a short look at strbuf.h after seeing the above code.
> And I was suprised to see that all strbuf users were exposed to
> the strbuf structure.
Well, they *have* to. We want people to declare their strbufs as automatic
or static structures, and using a opaque struct pointer is *not* an option
(like "FILE" is doing in stdio.h).
> Following patch would at least make sure noone fiddle with strbuf internals.
No, following patch is fundamentally broken - it's not even a good
starting point. It's bad, bad, bad.
It's also broken in another way: we want it to be really easy to use
strbuf's as normal C strings.
Yes, many (totally idiotic and broken) interfaces think it's so important
to "protect" their internal data structures that you have a
"string_to_c()" helper function for that. That may be "good abstraction",
but it's totally idiotic, because it results in horrible source code!
Tell me which is more readable:
printf("Hello %s\n", sb->buf);
or
printf("Hello %s\n", strbuf_to_c(sb));
and I claim that anybody who claims that the latter is "more readable" is
full of shit, and has an agenda to push, so it's "more agenda-friendly"
rather than readable!
So having "sb->buf" and "sb->len" be visible to users is a *good* thing.
Otherwise you end up having to create millions of idiotic small helper
functions, rather than just use the standard ones.
Linus
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