[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Get rid of p

[Ramiro Polla]

Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 06, 2008 at 05:09:27PM +0100, Ramiro Polla wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> By the message subject you probably asked yourself "what 'p'?".
>>
>> Exactly, I ask myself the same question when reading the source.
>>
>> I find one-letter variable names hard to grep for and hard to understand. 
>> Are patches to get rid of them or use more descriptive names welcome?
>>
>> Particular cases that come to my mind are:
>>  - 's', used throughout FFmpeg to mean context. I suggest to change them to 
>> ctx;
>>  - 'p', used in video encoders for something that I still have no idea what 
>> is doing there.
>>
>> Ramiro Polla
> 
>> Index: utils.c
>> ===================================================================
>> --- utils.c	(revision 13671)
>> +++ utils.c	(working copy)
>> @@ -2779,7 +2779,6 @@
>>  
>>  int64_t parse_date(const char *datestr, int duration)
>>  {
>> -    const char *p;
>>      int64_t t;
>>      struct tm dt;
>>      int i;
>> @@ -2808,12 +2807,11 @@
>>  
>>      memset(&dt, 0, sizeof(dt));
>>  
>> -    p = datestr;
> 
> int64_t parse_date(const char *p, int duration)
> 
> and your patch is much smaller

Hmmm... That goes against the whole purpose of my patch =)

> we can discuss the renaming then seperately ...
> iam not sure if its good or not for the functions in your patch ...

I know my argumentation skills are close to NULL, but I'll try anyways...

Once you know what the function does, having small variable names might 
be better, but if you're reading it for the first time to try and find 
out what it does, having single-letter or non-descriptive names makes it 
harder to understand. Or if you're debugging and stumble upon those 
variables, it takes longer to find out what they actually are.

I use FFmpeg's source code as a basis to learn lots of things. I prefer 
learning from well-written C code than textual descriptions like 
textbooks or tutorials, and I'm probably not the only one.

Another reason is that searching for any of occurrence of some variable 
becomes hard, since its name is part of many other variable names and 
mostly anything.

I found this specially painful when reading mpeg code for the mimic 
encoder. Long functions with lots of s around...

Ramiro Polla