Remove declaration-after-statement C warning

[patrick keshishian]

On 9/11/13, Bart Massey <bart at cs.pdx.edu> wrote:
> 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.)

That's a really poor argument. Using that logic: Do you know how
many off-by-one, buffer-overflow, double-free, etc. bugs could be
prevented if use of pointers are removed?

bah...
--patrick

> 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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