From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S264903AbUGIXvv (ORCPT ); Fri, 9 Jul 2004 19:51:51 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S265732AbUGIXvu (ORCPT ); Fri, 9 Jul 2004 19:51:50 -0400 Received: from mtvcafw.sgi.com ([192.48.171.6]:26229 "EHLO omx2.sgi.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S264903AbUGIXvf (ORCPT ); Fri, 9 Jul 2004 19:51:35 -0400 Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 16:49:19 -0700 From: Paul Jackson To: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) Cc: torvalds@osdl.org, herbert@gondor.apana.org.au, chrisw@osdl.org, akpm@osdl.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, sds@epoch.ncsc.mil, jmorris@redhat.com, mika@osdl.org Subject: Re: [PATCH] Use NULL instead of integer 0 in security/selinux/ Message-Id: <20040709164919.6b6a077d.pj@sgi.com> In-Reply-To: References: Organization: SGI X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.8.10claws (GTK+ 1.2.10; i686-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Eric wrote: > > Does this mean constructs like: > ``if (pointer)'' and ``if (!pointer)'' are also outlawed. > > And do we then need to initialize static pointers to NULL instead > of letting them be implicitly 0. > > Is doing memset(&(struct with_embeded_pointers), 0, sizeof(struct)) > also wrong? I suspect not. Up to Linus. This is all about writing code that doesn't bite. Since mostly it's us humans doing the writing, this is more a human engineering problem than a pure mathematics problem such as Dijkstra or Wirth were closer to addressing. Let someone with demonstrated good taste dictate the style choices that lead to short, sweat, but seldom screwy code. It's all arbitrary as hell. The proof is in the pudding. -- I won't rest till it's the best ... Programmer, Linux Scalability Paul Jackson 1.650.933.1373