Re: Coding style question

> Yeah, I agree with that. But as Andrew noted, we don't really have any
> hard and fast coding rules --- the only guideline is to do your best to
> make your code readable, because other people *will* have to read it.

I'm not really looking for hard/fast rules. Just picking brains.

> In the particular example here I find Korry's proposed coding less
> readable than what's there, but I can't entirely put my finger on why.
> Maybe it's just the knowledge that it's less easily modifiable. In general,
> I'd say initializers with side effects or nonobvious ordering dependencies
> are definitely bad style, because someone might innocently rearrange
> them, eg to group all the variables of the same datatype together.
> You can get away with ordering dependencies like
>
> TupleDesc itupdesc = RelationGetDescr(rel);
> int natts = itupdesc->natts;
>
> because the dependency is obvious (even to the compiler). Anything more
> complex than this, I'd write as a statement not an initializer.

Agreed - I contrived an example (I just happened to be reading
_bt_check_unique()). In fact, I would not initialize 'offset' as I
suggested, but I probably would initialize just about everything else.

(In fact, in the actual code, there's a code-comment that describes the
initialization of offset - I would certainly leave that in place).

-- Korry