Remove declaration-after-statement C warning

[Bart Massey]

Well now I feel bad; I thought we had discussed this before and
everyone was OK with it. I should revert that patch now, I guess? My
sincere apologies for being premature.

For the record, though, I totally and vehemently disagree with the
"bad style" argument. Separating definition from declaration is bad
style, because it makes it easier to use a variable before it has been
initialized. Whenever possible, variables should be declared at point
of first assignment, so that it is clear that they have been
initialized.(If you disagree, I challenge you to go back through old
code and see how many uninitialized-variable bugs would have been
easily caught by this convention--it will be lots.) Further, said
definition should be as close as possible to the position of first
use. This allows one to easily see the definition when trying to
understand the code that uses the variable: a big aid to debugging and
analysis.

I know of no plausible SE case for declaring variables way up at the
top of the block they are defined in other than tradition. It was
originally done that way to make it easier for Fortran compilers,
AFAIK. It's error-prone and makes code harder to read: it's a
tradition we should enthusiastically abandon.

--Bart

On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Alan Coopersmith
<alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> wrote:
> On 09/11/13 08:52 PM, Daniel Stone wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 11 September 2013 17:31, Mark Kettenis <mark.kettenis at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> From: Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith at oracle.com>
>>>> Pushing the patch is easy - determining if it's our consensus to change
>>>> the X.Org coding style to allow this is the hard part.
>>>>
>>>> Does anyone object to allowing this change to the coding style now that
>>>> it's no longer a hard requirement for OpenBSD's ports?
>>>
>>>
>>> It's still bad style.
>>
>>
>> Yeah, I actually totally agree.
>
>
> The one bit I would like to have is declarations in for/while loops, such
> as
>         for (int i = 0; i < MAXSCREENS; i++)
>
> Having declarations in the middle of code blocks I can live without, though
> in a few cases it would reduce the complexity of our #ifdef nesting.
>
>
> --
>         -Alan Coopersmith-              alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
>          Oracle Solaris Engineering - http://blogs.oracle.com/alanc
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