9fans archive / 2000 / 08 / 24 /    prev next

From: "James A. Robinson" <jim.robinson@sta...>
Subject: Re: [9fans] Installing the updates 
Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 09:32:35 -0700

> It would be nice if Pike could present a compelling argument. 
> [...]
> Where's the horror here?  Computers are fast.  Pushing extra work on
> programmers and creating an unnecessary portability issue is a high
> cost.  Reading a header file five or more times during compilation is
> a low cost (and one which can be optimized away for ifdef-protected
> headers; I'm told gcc does so).

The horror is that many header files don't get 'the dance' right. Even OS
header files are screwed up sometimes. Before I read Notes on Programming
in C I had put all #include calls into my program's local header file
because that was how I had always seen it done.  When I started writing
libraries, I found all kinds of problems with the compiler complaining
about multiple definitions (both my own and the system headers).

I think it even makes good sense from an interface perspective. The header
file shows the interface for program file. The program should hide all
the implementation details, which means you shouldn't be able to tell
which system calls the program makes to get the job done. Realizing that
you keep including the same files may also force an eye toward keeping
solid boundries across the different files (one does x, and only x. The
next only handles y).  Of course, if the file hides a bad job (say,
calls to strtok(2)) then you're screwed anyway.

Why do people object to this rule? It's not hard to follow, right?
It's really not that much extra work, in my opinion. Of course there
are a few that always get included, stdlib for example, but I've found
only a few overlaps in a library I've just written. It's spread over
9 files, and you can see that there isn't *that* much overlap:

; grep '#include' *.c|cut -d: -f2|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr
      8	#include <stdlib.h>
      5	#include <string.h>
      5	#include <limits.h>
      5	#include <errno.h>
      4	#include <unistd.h>
      4	#include <sys/types.h>
      4	#include <sys/stat.h>
      4	#include <stdio.h>
      4	#include <fcntl.h>
      2	#include <time.h>
      2	#include <stdarg.h>
      2	#include <pthread.h>
      1	#include <sys/poll.h>
      1	#include <sys/file.h>
      1	#include <strings.h>
      1	#include <ctype.h>
      1	#include <assert.h>

Jim