Hello CURL developers,
My name is Niranjan and I work at Intel. We were recently analyzing various
open-source GitHub repositories for idiosyncratic programming patterns. We came
across “if (s->keepon > TRUE)” pattern at line 360 in lib/http_proxy.c, and we
believe that this pattern is a bit confusing, and can lead to a potential issue
in the future. We wanted to have your opinion about it.
Here are more details about this pattern. keepon is defined as int in struct
http_connect_state in lib/urldata.h,
/* struct for HTTP CONNECT state data */
struct http_connect_state {
…
int keepon;
…
};
while TRUE is defined as true in curl_setup_once.h.
#ifndef TRUE
#define TRUE true
#endif
#ifndef FALSE
#define FALSE false
#endif
It seems that “if (s->keepon > TRUE)” code intends to capture the semantics of
“s->keepon > 1”, as true is defined as integer 1 in C language. In fact,
lib/http_proxy.c contains “s->keepon = 2;”
We believe that the aforementioned pattern, however, causes confusion because
any non-zero value can be considered as true in C language. In other words,
even a negative value of keepon can satisfy the condition if we consider this
notion. We believe that using “if (s->keepon > 1)” would eliminate this
confusion and capture the intended semantics precisely.
Do you have any comments on this recommendation and the potential confusion we
mentioned?
Thanks,
Niranjan.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Unsubscribe: https://cool.haxx.se/list/listinfo/curl-library
Etiquette: https://curl.haxx.se/mail/etiquette.html
