On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 12:14:44PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 12:10 PM Linus Torvalds
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

We can do

        typeof(pos) pos

in the 'for ()' loop, and never use __iter at all.

That means that inside the for-loop, we use a _different_ 'pos' than outside.

The thing that makes me throw up in my mouth a bit is that in that

        typeof(pos) pos

the first 'pos' (that we use for just the typeof) is that outer-level
'pos', IOW it's a *different* 'pos' than the second 'pos' in that same
declaration that declares the inner level shadowing new 'pos'
variable.

The new "pos" has not yet been declared, so this has to refer to the
outer "pos", it cannot be the inner one.  Because it hasn't been
declared yet :-)

Compare this to
  typeof (pos) pos = pos;
where that last "pos" *does* refer to the newly declared one: that
declaration has already been done!  (So this code is UB btw, 6.3.2.1/2).

If I was a compiler person, I would say "Linus, that thing is too ugly
to live", and I would hate it. I'm just hoping that even compiler
people say "that's *so* ugly it's almost beautiful".

It is perfectly well-defined.  Well, it would be good if we (GCC) would
document it does work, and if someone tested it on LLVM as well.  But it
is really hard to implement it to *not* work :-)

Because it does seem to work. It's not pretty, but hey, it's not like
our headers are really ever be winning any beauty contests...

It is very pretty!  Needs a comment though :-)


Segher