RE: convert this code

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: James Rich
>
> > > From: James Rich
> > >
> > >   for (i = 0; ((line[i] == stop) && (line[i]));)
> > >  (...)
> > >   for (x = 0; ((line[x]) && (line[x] != stop)); x++)
> >
> > This is bad code.  It's called "for abuse", and is pretty unanimously
> > condemned.  Converting this to RPG is just asking for problems.
>
> I didn't write it.  It actually came from NCSA's httpd.  This is sample
> code they included with the httpd daemon.
>
> Anyway I'm not so sure it's all that bad.  It does exactly the right thing
> and I can't think of a better way (in C) to do it.

Sorry, James, but it's bad.  It's horrible.  Most C programming texts will
tell you that this is a bad way to use the "for" construct.  A better way is
to use a "while".  This puts the initialization on a different line than the
terminator and allows you to easily comment the individual phrases.

While there is often room for debate on programming styles, there's really
no doubt that this is terrible code.


> Yes, I've used SCAN plenty of times.  I already had the above piece of
> code for my CGI stuff.  It already did what I wanted.  And honestly SCAN
> hasn't seemed that much better (except that it is already part of RPG,
> which doesn't matter if I make the getword() function a C module and just
> pass stuff to it from RPG).

Copying bad code written by other people rather than doing it yourself is
the first step down the road to code bloat.  Sorry, but that's my opinion.
Gotta go now.

Joe