Re: [PATCH] linux/string.h: Introduce streq macro.

From: Steven Rostedt
Date: Wed Apr 27 2011 - 20:06:08 EST


On Wed, 2011-04-27 at 22:46 +0100, Al Viro wrote:

> That's the whole fucking _point_; adding random extensions to the language
> leads to the place where Pascal and LISP are and it's not pretty. Each
> might make sense taken separately (hell, bzero(3) would prevent real, honest
> to Cthulhu bugs - it's memset(p, 0, n) and we had memset-with-swapped-arguments
> bugs fairly often and yes, in our tree most of memset() callers do pass '\0'
> as the second argument). Pile enough of those together and you've got yourself
> a dialect only you understand. _Bad_ idea, since the next thing that happens
> is different dialects in different parts of tree. And the end of non-incestous
> code review and fixes. I've seen it first-hand (OK, second - I had enough
> sense to stay out of that particular clusterfuck) on Algol 68 codebase. I
> *really*, *really* do not want to see anything similar ever again. Especially
> on projects I can't just piss upon and walk away from. The fact that in C
> you *can* extend the language that way doesn't make it a good idea.
>

So in translating the above I have:

"Don't do this because you are opening up a door that will lead to
extension hell"

Am I correct?

If I am, then I will take that as a reason not to add it and leave it at
that.

-- Steve


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