FreeLists / haiku-development / [haiku-development] Re: Haiku Coding Guidelines Issues

["Truls Becken" <truls.becken@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 9/4/07, Ingo Weinhold <bonefish@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > The * for pointers is always located by the variable or method name,
> > right? There are examples of this, but it isn't spelled out
> > explicitly. For example:
> >
> > class Example {
> >     public:
> >         Example();
> >         ~Example();
> >
> >         const char *Name();
> >
> >     private:
> >         BString *fName;
> > }
>
> Actually as OpenBeOS started that was more or less the convention, but
> since the '*' or '&' belong to the type some people (at least Axel and me)
> consequently sticking it to the type nowadays. According to his sample file
> Michael feels the same, but still has a space between type and '*'.

I'm no Be/Haiku coding standard expert, or even developer, but I still
want to mention the following. There's a reason why it's considered
good practice to write * and & next to the variable rather than the
type. Consider this declaration:

    char* foo, bar;

Intuitively, this should declare two string variables, but the fact is
that this makes foo a string and bar a character. Grouping the * with
the variable name makes it more obvious that it modifies the type of a
single variable only. While this reasoning does not really apply to
method signatures, it's more consistant to use the same convention for
both methods and variables.

Regards,
Truls