Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 10:39:53 +0100
From: Al Viro <viro@ftp.linux.org.uk>
To: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>, Russell King <rmk+lkml@arm.linux.org.uk>,
       Linux Kernel List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Subject: Re: p = kmalloc(sizeof(*p), )
Message-ID: <20050920093953.GM7992@ftp.linux.org.uk>
References: <20050918100627.GA16007@flint.arm.linux.org.uk> <1127061146.6939.6.camel@phantasy> <84144f020509200153f0becf2@mail.gmail.com>
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On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 11:53:42AM +0300, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> On 9/18/05, Robert Love <rml@novell.com> wrote:
> > 5.  Contrary to the above statement, such coding style does not help,
> >     but in fact hurts, readability.  How on Earth is sizeof(*p) more
> >     readable and information-rich than sizeof(struct foo)?  It looks
> >     like the remains of a 5,000 year old wolverine's spleen and
> >     conveys no information about the type of the object that is being
> >     created.
> 
> Yes it does. The semantics are clearly "I want enough memory to hold
> the type this pointer points to." While sizeof(struct foo) might seem
> more readable, it is in fact not as you have no way of knowing whether
> the allocation is correct or not by looking at the line. So for
> spotting allocation errors with grep, the shorter form is better (and
> arguably less error-prone).

Huh???   How do you use grep to find something of that sort?
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