Unique Style of Flow Control
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[font=arial]I recently picked up a copy of the book "Developing Microsoft Media Foundation Applications" by Anton Polinger. I have been interested in adding some video capture and playback for my rendering framework, and finally got a chance to get started on the book.
What I immediately found interesting was in the foreword on page xvi, the author describes a coding practice that he uses throughout the examples. The idea is to use a 'do {} while(false)' pattern, and he puts all of his operations into the brackets of the do statement. The loop will execute precisely once, and he wraps all of those operations with a macro that 'break' on an error. This effectively jumps to the end of the block when an error occurs, without requiring verbose return codes or exception handling.
[color=rgb(0,0,0)][background=transparent]I haven't ever seen this type of flow control, so I was wondering what your thoughts on this are. I would assume that the compiler would optimize out the loop altogether (eliminating the loop, but still executing the block) due to the always false condition, but the macros for checking failure would still end up jumping properly to the end of the block. It seems like a relatively efficient pattern for executing a number of heavy duty operations, while still retaining pretty good readability.[/background][/color]
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What I immediately found interesting was in the foreword on page xvi, the author describes a coding practice that he uses throughout the examples. The idea is to use a 'do {} while(false)' pattern, and he puts all of his operations into the brackets of the do statement. The loop will execute precisely once, and he wraps all of those operations with a macro that 'break' on an error. This effectively jumps to the end of the block when an error occurs, without requiring verbose return codes or exception handling.
[color=rgb(0,0,0)][background=transparent]I haven't ever seen this type of flow control, so I was wondering what your thoughts on this are. I would assume that the compiler would optimize out the loop altogether (eliminating the loop, but still executing the block) due to the always false condition, but the macros for checking failure would still end up jumping properly to the end of the block. It seems like a relatively efficient pattern for executing a number of heavy duty operations, while still retaining pretty good readability.[/background][/color]
[color=rgb(0,0,0)][background=transparent]I have asked around, and this seems to be at least a known practice. If there are any interesting use cases where this makes especially good sense, I would love to hear about them![/background][/color]
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