I mentioned recently (in commit 9e7d4c53d8) message that I'm no
longer fond of the variable name 'ret', because it's used in two quite
different contexts: it's the return value from a subroutine you just
called (e.g. 'int ret = read(fd, buf, len);' and then check for error
or EOF), or it's the value you're preparing to return from the
_containing_ routine (maybe by assigning it a default value and then
conditionally modifying it, or by starting at NULL and reallocating,
or setting it just before using the 'goto out' cleanup idiom). In the
past I've occasionally made mistakes by forgetting which meaning the
variable had, or accidentally conflating both uses.
If all else fails, I now prefer 'retd' (short for 'returned') in the
former situation, and 'toret' (obviously, the value 'to return') in
the latter case. But even better is to pick a name that actually says
something more specific about what the thing actually is.
One particular bad habit throughout this codebase is to have a set of
functions that deal with some object type (say 'Foo'), all *but one*
of which take a 'Foo *foo' parameter, but the foo_new() function
starts with 'Foo *ret = snew(Foo)'. If all the rest of them think the
canonical name for the ambient Foo is 'foo', so should foo_new()!
So here's a no-brainer start on cutting down on the uses of 'ret': I
looked for all the cases where it was being assigned the result of an
allocation, and renamed the variable to be a description of the thing
being allocated. In the case of a new() function belonging to a
family, I picked the same name as the rest of the functions in its own
family, for consistency. In other cases I picked something sensible.
One case where it _does_ make sense not to use your usual name for the
variable type is when you're cloning an existing object. In that case,
_neither_ of the Foo objects involved should be called 'foo', because
it's ambiguous! They should be named so you can see which is which. In
the two cases I found here, I've called them 'orig' and 'copy'.
As in the previous refactoring, many thanks to clang-rename for the
help.
This patch fixes a few other whitespace and formatting issues which
were pointed out by the bulk-reindent or which I spotted in passing,
some involving manual editing to break lines more nicely.
I think the weirdest hunk in here is the one in windows/window.c
TranslateKey() where _half_ of an assignment statement inside an 'if'
was on the same line as the trailing paren of the if condition. No
idea at all how that one managed to happen!
If the function name (or expression) in a function call or declaration
is itself so long that even the first argument doesn't fit after it on
the same line, or if that would leave so little space that it would be
silly to try to wrap all the run-on lines into a tall thin column,
then I used to do this
ludicrously_long_function_name
(arg1, arg2, arg3);
and now prefer this
ludicrously_long_function_name(
arg1, arg2, arg3);
I picked up the habit from Python, where the latter idiom is required
by Python's syntactic significance of newlines (you can write the
former if you use a backslash-continuation, but pretty much everyone
seems to agree that that's much uglier). But I've found it works well
in C as well: it makes it more obvious that the previous line is
incomplete, it gives you a tiny bit more space to wrap the following
lines into (the old idiom indents the _third_ line one space beyond
the second), and I generally turn out to agree with the knock-on
indentation decisions made by at least Emacs if you do it in the
middle of a complex expression. Plus, of course, using the _same_
idiom between C and Python means less state-switching.
So, while I'm making annoying indentation changes in general, this
seems like a good time to dig out all the cases of the old idiom in
this code, and switch them over to the new.
My bulk indentation check also turned up a lot of cases where a run-on
function call or if statement didn't have its later lines aligned
correctly relative to the open paren.
I think this is quite easy to do by getting things out of
sync (editing the first line of the function call and forgetting to
update the rest, perhaps even because you never _saw_ the rest during
a search-replace). But a few didn't quite fit into that pattern, in
particular an outright misleading case in unix/askpass.c where the
second line of a call was aligned neatly below the _wrong_ one of the
open parens on the opening line.
Restored as many alignments as I could easily find.
This clears up another large pile of clutter at the top level, and in
the process, allows me to rename source files to things that don't all
have that annoying 'ssh' prefix at the top.
