Re: [PATCH] teach checkpatch.pl about list_for_each

[Benny Halevy <bhalevy@panasas.com>]

On Jan. 03, 2008, 14:30 +0200, Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com> wrote:
> Em Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 12:26:10PM +0000, Christoph Hellwig escreveu:
>> On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 11:10:58AM +0000, Andy Whitcroft wrote:
>>> We have had some stabs at changing this, but no consensus was reached on
>>> whether it was a "for" or a "function".  My memory is of there being
>>> slightly more "without a space" tenders than the other and so it has not
>>> been changed.  This thread also seems so far to have not really
>>> generated a concensus.  So I would tend to leave things as they are.  
>>>
>>> A third option might be to accept either on *for_each* constructs.
>>> That might tend to lead to divergance.  Difficult.  However, also see my
>>> later comments on "style guide".
>> Pretty much all core code uses list_for_each_entry( so new code should
>> follow that example.
> 
> Agreed, CodingStyle is not about mindless consistency such as "for (" is
> the right thing, so "list_for_each (" is consistent with it, it is about
> codifying practice contributors got used to over the years.
> 

Why mindless?
Coding style is also about giving the coding language logic a graphical
representation.  Following a convention that flow control keywords
such as "if", "for", or "while" are distinguished from function calls
by use of a space after the keyword really helps the code readability
regardless of how people used to code it in the past...
The for_each_* macros are clearly not function calls but rather translate
to for () flow control constructs hence they should follow the same convention.
FWIW, I think that changing the existing convention is worth it in this case.

Benny

> - Arnaldo