Re: ftell: two minor proposed patches

[Jim Meyering]

Paul Eggert wrote:

> On 07/24/11 10:25, Bruno Haible wrote:
>> I thought about this as well, but it has the drawback that "grep '(long)'"
>> wouldn't find this occurrence.
>
> That's a minor disadvantage.  Such a grep is doomed to failure,
> as gnulib must have hundreds of conversion to 'long' that the 'grep'
> will miss.  Avoiding the error-proneness of the cast is more important
> than using the cast to highlight this particular conversion.
>
> That being said, it may be that you prefer highlighting this particular
> conversion because it may narrow the value.  If that's the case, how
> about this idea instead?  It has a "(long)" that can be grepped for,
> and it avoids the cast.
>
>   if (LONG_MIN <= offset && offset <= LONG_MAX)
>     return /* (long) */ offset;
>
> Personally I don't like this kind of decoration, as I think it's
> unnecessary clutter, but it's better than what we have now because
> it avoids the cast.

I'd prefer to avoid catering to a search for '(long)'
in part because it will fail whenever someone uses the
equivalent '(long int)'.  Also, I go to great lengths
to avoid casts altogether, just because they are so error-
prone in general.  That said, if the above helps Bruno,
it's fine with me: the commented cast is a nice compromise.