Re: [PATCH 0/30] return statement cleanup - kill pointless parentheses

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Dunnersdag 16 Dezember 2004 01:02, Jesper Juhl wrote:
> If these patches are generally acceted then I think it would make sense to 
> make a small addition to Documentation/CodingStyle mentioning the prefered 
> form of return statements, so we (hopefully) won't have to do cleanups 
> like this too often in the future.
> Below I've included a proposed patch adding such a bit to CodingStyle.

I think the change in Documentation/CodingStyle is useful, even though I
don't really like changing all the existing code without going through
the respective maintainers.

> 1) the parentheses are pointless.
> 2) removing the parentheses decreases source file size slightly.
> 3) they look odd and when reading code you don't want to be stopped wondering
>    - no parentheses is simply more readable (at least to me). 
> 4) When I've submitted patches for other stuff in the past I've a few times
>    been asked if I could fix up the return statements while I was at it - so
>    it seems to be wanted.  

This is basically the same category as the first three chapters of
CodingStyle. It's not nice to read, but there is no real problem in the 
code. Think of these issues as whitespace fixes: you are making the job
harder for code maintainers for very little gain. I would suggest that
you submit these patches only to the code maintainers, not to the Trivial
Patch Monkey or Andrew.

Or even better, change scripts/Lindent to do the change automatically for
code that it is used on, if that can be done in a reliable way.

 Arnd <><

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