On Tue, 23 Dec 2008, Krzysztof Halasa wrote: > Harvey Harrison <harvey.harrison@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > > >> There are many ways to make the code more merge friendly at a cost of > >> readability. Hope we don't go this way. > > > > Linus himself added that particular warning to sparse...may want to check > > with him the reason for it. > > Once again, this is a personal thing, and a harmless one. It's more than that. I added the check after some person who had been programming the kernel (and thus was supposedly fluent in C) literally could not parse a macro that had "do x while (y)" in it. Why? Because it's so uncommon, and because "while (y)" on its own means something totally different. So the syntactic sugar to _always_ have do-while loops have that brace is a way to avoid one of the rather few places where the C language has syntax that is very context-dependent. Another example of this is "sizeof". The kernel universally (I hope) has parenthesis around the sizeof argument, even though it's clearly not required by the C language. It's a coding standard. And quite frankly, anybody who works on gcc has no place complaining about sparse coding standard warnings. They are a _hell_ of a lot better than some of the really crazy warnings gcc spews out with "-W". At least the sparse warnings you can make go away while making the code more understandable. Some of the -W warnings are unfixable without breaking the source code. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kernel-janitors" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
