[Tinyos-host-mote-wg] [Tinyos-2.0wg] recommendation for coding convention on state variables

[Philip Levis]

This is a coding conventions thing, and should probably make its way
into TEP 3 accordingly.

I've recently been using JTAG a lot, and it's amazingly useful for
debugging code on the node (shocking, I know). There's something that
you can do with your code to make this much easier, specifically for
inspecting state variables.

The standard TinyOS component does something like this:

enum {
  STATE_ONE,
  STATE_TWO,
  STATE_THREE,
};

uint8_t myState;

In a debugger, when you inspect myState you'll see 0, 1, or 2. In this
case, you can figure out what state that is pretty easily, but in
something like a radio stack where there are 8 different states,
counting the enums (or looking them up when explicitly assigned) is a
pain. Instead, if you do this:

typedef enum {
  STATE_ONE,
  STATE_TWO,
  STATE_THREE
} my_state_t;

my_state_t myState;

then when you inspect myState the debugger will tell you STATE_ONE or
STATE_TWO or STATE_THREE.

Which is kind of nice.

I'd therefore recommend doing state variables in this way. There's no
cost, etc.

Phil


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