Remove declaration-after-statement C warning

[Aaron Plattner]

On 09/11/2013 10:55 PM, Bart Massey 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

They should also be declared const whenever possible IMO, though nobody 
else seems to care about that.  Having to separate the declaration and 
initialization for artificial language reasons precludes that.

> 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

-- 
Aaron