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Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:41:25 -0600
Subject: Cleanup and maintenance of internal C code
From: andy@petdance.com (Andy Lester)

Hi, I'm Andy Lester, and I'm usually a Perl person.  I've worked on  
the Perl 5 and Parrot internals over the past few years, working to  
clean up the C code.

The other day I was poking through the C code behind PHP 5.2 and saw  
some places that I thought I could help clean up.  If the PHP core  
folks are interested (and I have no idea how you PHP people handle  
maintenance on things like this), I'd be glad to do some safety and  
stylistic improvements that should help make the code safer.

The changes I'd be looking to make are:

* Using const qualifiers on as many core functions as possible,
* Using const qualifiers on variables to help ensure they don't get  
changed accidentally
* Using variables in the smallest scope possible

I've undertaken this task in Perl 5 and Parrot to great effect, and  
just had a little patch accepted here http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=43041 
.  In the Parrot project, I wrote a guide to the benefits of consting: http://search.cpan.org/~chromatic/parrot-0.5.0/docs/project/cage_cleaners_guide.pod#Why_consting_is_good
  It seems PHP is using const in some places, but many more remain to  
be exploited.

Is this something you'd be interested in, or should I not bother?  If  
so, how shall I begin?

thanks,
xoxo,
Andy



--
Andy Lester => andy@petdance.com => www.petdance.com => AIM:petdance