Messages in this thread | | | From | (Linus Torvalds) | Subject | Re: [patch] Workqueue Abstraction, 2.5.40-H7 | Date | Tue, 1 Oct 2002 19:53:39 +0000 (UTC) |
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In article <Pine.LNX.4.33.0210011210030.1878-100000@penguin.transmeta.com>, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com> wrote: > >Pease don't introduce more typedefs. They only hide what the hell the >thing is, which is actively _bad_ for structures, since passing a >structure by value etc is something that should never be done, for >example.
Btw, just to avoid counter-examples: Linux does use structures and typedefs occasionally to hide and force compiler typechecking on small structures on purpose. We have a few places where we do things like
typedef struct { unsigned int value; } atomic_t;
(and similar things for the page table entries etc).
This is done because the things are often really regular scalars, but we use the structure as a strict type checking mechanism. In this case, using a typedef is fine, because we don't actually ever want to _access_ it as a structure, and the typedef provices exactly the kind of information hiding that we need.
But type hiding for a real structure just doesn't make sense, since we use it as a true structure, and hiding information just makes it harder to see.
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