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by simias 4496 days ago
Okay? Is that really worthy of being submitted to hn however?

The function being called is directly above this declaration. It's a static function not used outside of this file. What are the chances that someone would edit this code without understanding what "three" is used for in this context? Pretty slim I wager.

It's good that people are auditing the linux source code but if you stumble upon some weird looking code (which again, is not the case here in my opinion) the right way to deal with it is not to post it on hacker news. Contact the maintainer (look at the MAINTAINER file at the root of the kernel) if possible with a patch to fix the issue.

1 comments

Depends on the intent of submitting it. If his intent was to point out a potential bug in the Linux kernel then yes, it shouldn't have been submitted. On the other hand what has resulted has been a rather interesting debate about the merits of variable naming vs. proper commenting, with some side commentary about what a shitty name something like three and five make for variables.