27 Sep
2005
27 Sep
'05
9:03 p.m.
I'd just like to chime in here with my opinion. About a year ago I had
the idea of introducing macros for error handling instead of explicit
gotos. We had some discussion on the matter, and I read several papers
on the web, and came to agree that use of macros that change flow
control is anathma. It makes the code completely unreadable and
unmaintainable.
At first it seemed like a great idea to hide the "nasty" gotos and have
to type less while hammering out the code, but in the end, even when you
are familliar with the macros, it looks ugly, and for someone who isn't
familliar with the macros, it is utterly unreadable.
Recently I was reading over some apache code and they make extensive use
of macros for flow control. I found myself becoming frustrated to no
end because I could not figure out what the hell was going on. They
looked like nice, neat function calls, but I could not for the life of
me figure out where the code was that was being called. It wouldn't
have looked so deceptively simple if they coded out what was going on
explicitly instead of using macros, but it would have been easy to
understand, and why should something look deceptively simple when it
really isn't? That only leads to confusion when trying to understand
what's going on under the hood.