On Tuesday, September 25, 2012 19:51:42 deadalnix wrote:
> Le 25/09/2012 18:38, Jonathan M Davis a écrit :
> > On Tuesday, September 25, 2012 14:53:17 Manu wrote:
> >> I really need this. Why is it illegal? Is there chance of having this
> >> supported? What are the problems?
> > 
> > I confess that I don't understand why you'd ever need function prototypes,
> > so clearly one (or both) of us is missing something here.
> 
> It can help IDE for instance. Or help the programmer when looking for
> references in the source code.

I don't understand this. The IDE can see what functions are there. How would 
having a function prototype affect that? It has to look for the real function 
regardless, since there's no guarantee that they all have prototypes. The same 
goes for the programmer. And if it's a matter of knowing what functions in a 
module are publicly available to use, then that's what generated documentation 
is for. The only languages that I know of which use prototypes are C and C++, 
and folks in other languages get by just fine without them. They only exist in 
C/C++ beacuse of its antiquated compilation model. Sure, they could be useful 
at times for documentation purposes, but it's code duplication which may or 
may not be up-to-date with the actual code, especially when the language is 
advanced enough that it doesn't need a function to be declared earlier in the 
file than where it's called. And generated documentation or an IDE solves the 
problem of getting a list of the functions if that's what you want.

Regardless, Manu seems to have issues related to linking, which is a 
completely separate issue and that's what I don't understand.

- Jonathan M Davis

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