Re: Coding Style Question - Is there any sane reason for doing this?
On 1/11/2012 10:14 AM, Juha Nieminen wrote:
Jorgen Grahn<grahn+nntp@snipabacken.se> wrote:
I suspect others write 'unsigned int' because they believe verbosity
increases readability. I remember I did that very early in my career.
I have the exact opposite experience: Most noobs believe that verbosity
decreases readability, and thus proceed to write what effectively is
obfuscated C++.
Unfortunately, even some experienced professionals have this
misconception.
<shrug>
Read quickly: Raedablity is a mtater of ahbit and is'nt guiedd by eaxct
precpetpion; itis fzuzy.
You managed to read the line above, didn't you? It's the same way with
the source. 'unsigned int' or 'unsigned' doesn't really matter for
readability. A quick glance gives all the information one needs.
However, when it comes to bits and their positions, it's different. I
guess, it all comes down to the degree of complexity and one's knack to
read (comprehend) what others might consider obscure, like hexadecimals
or octals.
Here is another example. In our codebase we have tons of flags, most of
which have symbolic representation. That representation hasn't changed
in years. Yet, I can't read the value 0x29020 (only four bits, mind
you) and quickly figure out what bits are set. So, for debugging (and
only for debugging) I wrote a decoder function that displays the value
in the symbolic form... And in the code the value is never written as a
number. It's the debugging that presents a problem, AFAIC.
V
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