Jonathan M Davis: > The problem is that there are a lot of things that you can warn about which > aren't necessarily a problem, and it can be really annoying to have to fix a > bunch of useless warnings. If it really matters, then it should be an error. > And > if it doesn't really matter, then do we need to warn about?
This is a quite manichaean view of the programming world, but life isn't like that, it comes in shades of grey. I suggest you to read the book "Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic" by Bart Kosko, to help your mind grow up a bit. And sometimes even when the situation is clear for a human, a less smart compiler may be unsure, so it has to give a probability weighting of the situation. Some lint tools literally partition their messages in classes based on their truth probability. And then, keep in mind I was not talking about warnings in this post, but more about compiler tips. A performance tip, even when it's 100% certain, is not something you must listen to. It may be useful if you are performance-tuning a function, otherwise you may ignore it. This is why I have said they are a third kind of compiler message. > I'm not entirely against warnings, but I do think that there are a lot of > things > that keep getting proposed as warnings (particularly by Bearophile) which are > far more likely to be annoying to fix non-problems than to actually be a > problem > and that such warnings would be far better suited to a lint-like tool than > the > compiler. There are two things to say about lint tools: - They are really really useful if you write C code. And I think they may be useful for D code too. - Lot of people aren't using them. I know older programmers that didn't even know what a lint is. In my opinion one way to avoid this is to put some lint-capabilities inside the compiler. Putting a whole lint inside the compiler is probably not a good idea, because they a good lint is complex. So I think it's a good thing to put some simple lint functionality inside the dmd compiler. In Bugzilla I have added some enhancement requests about this, that have received many comments from people. Bye, bearophile
