Re: convention for declaring pointers?

[John W. Eaton]

On 04/24/2017 01:40 AM, Mike Miller wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 22:15:27 -0700, Rik wrote:
> > jwe,
> >
> > Is there a convention for whether to cuddle the '*' for pointers with the
> > variable name, variable type, or neither?  I noticed in
> > liboctave/array/idx-vector.h declarations such as the following
> >
> > idx_range_rep * r = dynamic_cast<idx_range_rep *> (rep);
> >
> > I started to change this to
> >
> > idx_range_rep *r = ...
> >
> > but then I realized that maybe the extra space is good.  It is consistent
> > with the rest of Octave coding conventions which tends to emphasize extra
> > whitespace for readability.  The space between the name of a function and
> > the opening parenthesis is an example of this openness.
>
> I've always seen the style
>
>     idx_range_rep *r = ...
>
> preferred, and I think we pretty consistently prefer that in Octave so
> far. It also helps emphasize that the '*' is required for each
> declaration in a compound declaration like
>
>     octave_idx_type *ridx, *cidx;
>
> GNU indent also corrects the string "int * x" to "int *x".

Yeah, I've always used "int *x", probably from reading the first edition 
of K&R, which notes that "*x" is an int.

For references, however, I've always written "int& y", which is what I 
first saw in the first edition of TC++PL.

There is also this:  http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq2.html#whitespace

Currently, I think we mostly use "int *x" and "int& y" and would be 
happy to continue doing that.  If you feel strongly that we should use 
consistent spacing for pointers and references, then I'd prefer

  "int* x" and "int& y"

over

  "int *x" and "int &y".

And I'd definitely prefer any of the above over using spaces on both 
sides of the "*" and "&".

jwe