Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Style question passing boolean parameters

[Bill Meier <wmeier@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/20/2012 1:12 AM, Joerg Mayer wrote:
> The following commit retriggered an allergic reaction to controlling function
> behaviour via booleans:
>
>          if (cf_save_packets(&cfile, file_name8->str, filetype, FALSE/*compressed */, FALSE/*discard_comments */, FALSE/* dont_reopen */) != CF_OK) {
>
> To me, this is sort of unreadable without the comments and ugly looking with
> the comments. My favourite nightmare in this regard in wireshark source is
> dissect_ieee80211_common which has 4 boolean parameters and no comments anywhere
> where it is called.
>
> What ways are there to fix this? Is replacing the boolean types by an enum with
> speaking elements a valid solution? As an example, the above might read:
>
>          if (cf_save_packets(&cfile, file_name8->str, filetype, NOT_COMPRESSED, DONT_DISCARD_COMMENTS, DONT_REOPEN) != CF_OK) {
>
> What would be good names for the elements in the enums?


I have the same "allergic reactiuon" as described above.

Using enums would help; Unfortunately they all share a single namespace, 
so something like CF_SAVE_PACKETS_NOT_COMPRESSED, etc might be required; 
this seems just a bit clumsy (but doable).