On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 04:05:51PM +0000, Nicholas Mc Guire wrote:
On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 09:04:35AM -0400, Ruben Safir wrote:
On 03/29/2017 08:30 PM, Tobin C. Harding wrote:
Does the kernel community have a preference when using the address of the first element of an an array?
1. addr = &array[0] 2. addr = array;
$ grep '\&.*\[0\]' | wc -l 10077
style (1) is clearly used, I was not able to grep for instances where style (2) is used.
maybe there is a another reason why 2 is not used.
the second form is used - just not quite as often with the below quick (and probably incomplete) coccinelle script you can find a few hundred occurences of the second form in linux-next
<snip> virtual report
@v2@ identifier array,addr; type T; position p; @@
( * T array[]; | * T array[] = ...; ) ... * addr = array@p
@script:python@ p << v2.p; @@ print "%s:%s" % (p[0].file,p[0].line) <snip>
If its really obvious that its an array that you are manipulating maybe the second version is fine - if its not so obvious the first version makes it clear - and as readability is a key issue for any complex code I suspect that readability explains the preference.
Got it, readability over brevity. thanks, Tobin.