[PATCH 00/18] use semicolons rather than commas to separate statements

Julia Lawall julia.lawall at inria.fr
Tue Sep 29 08:47:29 EDT 2020



On Tue, 29 Sep 2020, Dan Carpenter wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 29, 2020 at 02:20:00PM +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> > On Sun, 27 Sep 2020 at 21:56, Julia Lawall <Julia.Lawall at inria.fr> wrote:
> > >
> > > These patches replace commas by semicolons.
> >
> >
> > Why?
> >
>
> In the best case, these commas are just uninitentional mess, like typing
> an extra space character or something.  I've looked at them before and
> one case I see where they are introduced is when people convert a
> struct initializer to code.
>
> -	struct foo {
> -		.a = 1,
> -		.b = 2,
>  		...
> +	foo.a = 1,
> +	foo.b = 2,
>
> The times where commas are used deliberately to replace curly braces are
> just evil.  Either way the code is cleaner with semi-colons.

I also found exaamples like the following to be particularly unforunate:

                                fprintf(stderr,
                                        "page_nr %lu wrong count %Lu %Lu\n",
                                       page_nr, count,
                                       count_verify[page_nr]), exit(1);

The exit is very hard to see, unless you know to look for it.

julia



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