Re: library routine wrappers and serious overkill

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@mindspring.com>]

On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Glynn Clements wrote:

> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>
> >   now, i'm as big a fan as the next guy of good debugging (the
> > my_CONDITION macro is a local implementation of assert() with hooks to
> > a logging library -- yeesh) but, seriously, there has to be a limit to
> > just how much debugging you're going to apply to each and every
> > string-related library routine.  it does get kind of absurd after a
> > while:
> >
> > ===============================
> >
> > char
> > my_str_ch2upper(char const ch)
> > {
> >     DBUG_ENTER(__FUNCTION__);
> >
> >     if (isascii(ch) && islower(ch)) {
> >         DBUG_RETURN(toupper(ch));
> >     }
> >     DBUG_RETURN(ch);
> > }
> >
> >
> > ===============================
> >
> >   is this what you'd call best practice?
>
> It may be that the code was written for a platform which lacked a
> working debugger, so the program had to be able to generate its own
> stack traces etc.

in fact, that's exactly the case -- this code is for an embedded
system for which debugging capabilities are limited.  my point was
more that it seemed like overkill to add "dbug"-type wrapping around a
routine that did nothing more than convert a character to upper case.
and, on top of that, the input validation above is redundant -- the
definition of "toupper" is that it already checks whether the input
character is lower case before performing the conversion.

in any case, i have no beef with debugging code.  but i think there
are times when one gets a bit carried away.

rday