Re: [AGGREGATED PATCH] Fix in-place editing functions in convert.c

On Fri, 5 Oct 2007, Sam Ravnborg wrote:

I agree with the "no sane person", but the problem is that the insane people seem to be in no short supply.

Go look at string libraries, and they all do something like that. Or worse.

 - ustr: yes, it uses *exactly* what I described: "ustr_cstr()" and 
   "ustr_len()" instead of having the data/length available easily 
   (although it claims to do it for size reasons - perhaps valid in some 
   cases!)

 - libast: SPIF_CHARPTR_C(x). No, really.

 - Vstr: doesn't have a linear data representation. Needs explicit 
   flattening - although it appears to be something you're not ever 
   supposed to do - it has 200+ functions to do various magic things. 

 - Qt (QString): QString::"data()", "ascii()" or "utf8()" or something.

   At least this has the excuse of really being able to handle different 
   locales (it didn't do that originally, though!), but they end up having 
   a million helper functions exactly because you cannot use the normal 
   string routines on anything!

 - safesrtr, bstring: you just cast the pointer to "char *". Now *that* is 
   classy and safe.

So there's a few sane out there, but I actually think they are in the minority (Glib, others)

			Linus