Muli Ben-Yehuda <mulix@mulix.org> writes: > On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 02:30:06PM +0100, Tim Cambrant wrote: >> Could someone please explain to me why we have a bunch >> of gotos where they really could be removed? I'm sure >> there is a good reason, but I simply don't see it. For >> example, why shouldn't the following patch be applied? >> I'd appreciate any explanation I could get. Thank you. > > In this case, I agree that the patch could be applied. However, > there's a school of thought that goes something like this > > - we might add locking or some other resource acquisition to this > function in the future > - when we do, it would have to be converted to this 'goto style' to > clean up properly > - therefore, just use the goto style from the beginning, for > consistency > > And I agree with that school of thought as well. It boils down to the > style of whoever wrote the code. For what it's worth, these kinds of needless gotos are often the result of locking/cleanup code that's removed by a patch. The patch author is probably just trying to make minimal changes to the kernel. Recently that happened, and Linus asked the patch author to remove the goto. -- --Ed L Cashin | PGP public key: ecashin@uga.edu | http://noserose.net/e/pgp/ -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
