On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:33:36 -0500 "David C. Rankin" drankinatty@suddenlinkmail.com wrote:
Darrell, E (don't know first name)
E is fine. I'm not all that fond of my first name, and prefer not to use it.
I agree with all your comment and both proposals above, but like Darrell, I don't have a c++ background to know the 'best' way to do this. I certainly agree what declaration within the conditional looks bad, but I was not going to take the liberty and re-write it given the conservative approach I take when monkeying with the code (though I like the declaration outside the if statement much better as suggested). I know they are not big changes, but I don't know enough to know if they were declared in the if for some other reason.
I don't exactly have a C++ background either (I coded trivial stuff in it for about a year and a half as a CS grad student, going on fifteen years ago), but my suspicion in this case is that the original programmer was trying to save himself keystrokes and/or had taken up that idiom in order to save memory back in the days when RAM was measured in kilobytes (declaring r outside the if statement would keep it in scope just a little bit longer in most languages). Either that, or I've forgotten some obscure but vital point about C++ conditionals and scoping.