Re: Semicolons (Re: Low-Rent Syntax)

In article <3263@decuac.DEC.COM> mjr@decuac.DEC.COM (Marcus J. Ranum) writes:
...
> I can imagine building such capabilities into a pre-processor of some sort,
> that did idiot checking based on some information about the kind of things
> you wanted to do, but I don't think it belongs in the compiler (please!).
...


I, on the other hand, am quite happy with the general direction GNU CC has
taken, which is to provide a bunch of warnings for the kinds of suspect
constructs discussed in the above-referenced articles (although nothing that
clever, yet), but to require that the warnings be seperately and explicitly
enabled with compile-time switches. Thus, I tend to use these things the
way I use lint, which is to turn them on only when I really can't understand
why some code is broken, and have been staring at it for hours. Often, GCC
or lint will point out a legal but questionable line of code which will
suddenly make the whole problem clear to me -- especially if I was trying to
read someone else's code :-)...


Bart Massey
..tektronix!videovax.tv.tek.com!bart
..tektronix!reed.bitnet!bart
--

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