do {…} while(false)

Question

I was looking at some code by an individual and noticed he seems to have a pattern in his functions:

 function()
{
 

        

Answer 1

It is a very common practice. In C. I try to think of it as if you want to lie to yourself in a way "I'm not using a goto". Thinking about it, there would be nothing wrong with a goto used similarly. In fact it would also reduce indentation level.

That said, though, I noticed, very often this do..while loops tend to grow. And then they get ifs and elses inside, rendering the code actually not very readable, let alone testable.

Those do..while are normally intended to do a clean-up. By all means possible I would prefer to use RAII and return early from a short function. On the other hand, C doesn't provide you as much conveniences as C++ does, making a do..while one of the best approaches to do a cleanup.