Ah, so Advogato is back up.

I did get my hands on a Linux - I brought back one of my machines and installed Debian on it via 6 or 7 3.5" floppies and an ethernet connection to ADSL. And I ran Gnutizen on it. No major changes for Linux other than an #include <byteswap.h> for endian stuff.

I was reading the Linux Coding Style document that Linus was just mentioning on the Linux kernel mailing list. Gnutizen is my first big C project so I find such things helpful. He says comments should be put at the head of a function explaining what it does (not how it does it - he says that should be obvious from the code). I went through my code and removed most comments inside functions and put them at the head where I described what the function did.

The really big impact was his advice on functions - he says

Functions should be short and sweet, and do just one thing. They should fit on one or two screenfuls of text (the ISO/ANSI screen size is 80x24, as we all know), and do one thing and do that well.

Some of my functions were longer than 48 lines - a lot more, and unnecessarily so. I went through and broke up many of my longer functions after reading this, which took a while. In the section on functions he talks about variables.

Another measure of the function is the number of local variables. They shouldn't exceed 5-10, or you're doing something wrong. Re-think the function, and split it into smaller pieces. A human brain can generally easily keep track of about 7 different things, anything more and it gets confused. You know you're brilliant, but maybe you'd like to understand what you did 2 weeks from now.

Breaking down the functions helped me lose these variables, but I am trying to trim the functions down to 7, or at least 10 local variables. And not have global variables unless they're necessary.