Re: Status of Mac OS/X ports of git and cogito?

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Sep 11, 2005, 23:40 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0509111631500.3242@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0509120119120.10594@wgmdd8.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>

On Mon, 12 Sep 2005, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

>
> Linus, we all know that you are always right. Only that in this case you 
> are just a little bit less right than usual. The introduction of this 
> typedef was a sane thing to do, for the same reason it is a sane thing to 
> use sensible variable names: documentation.

Nope.

Go through the history of that thing.

It wasn't introduced as "socklen_t". It was introduced as "size_t".

That was so horribly wrong that it's not even funny.

Documentation my ass. It's a matter of people thinking that the old portable types aren't good enough, and that you have to make up new names for everything in order to allow "portability" where different systems have different ideas.

And it's ignoring the fact that true portability means "it just works". "size_t" fundamentally didn't work.

And the really sad part is that before the standards bodies started messing around with it, things really _did_ "just work". There was no question at all about what kind of type to use.

These days, we sadly have some systems that just blindly followed the standard, changed "int" to "size_t", and then when the standard was fixed, changed "socklen_t" to be "size_t".

Don't believe me? Just google for "size_t" and "socklen_t", and weep.

All this confusion, and for what? Absolutely _zero_ upsides.

Basically, if a programmer feels like he needs to remind himself what the variable was all about, how about using descriptive variable names? I claim that

	int addr_len;

is a lot more documentation than

	socklen_t len;

and that the people who think that different type-name are "documentation" are ignoring the fact that they are _also_ "confusing".

There's a virtue in simplicity. Abstraction is _not_ a virtue.

			Linus