Re: of possible interest

["Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Georg Bauhaus writes :
> On Sun, 2006-05-07 at 22:37 +0200, Frederic Praca wrote:
>> Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> a écrit :
>>
>>> 	begin
>>> 		dummy := some_function(some_argument);
>>> 		--	dummy is never made use of; effectively
>>> ignored end;
>>
>> Yes but in this case, everybody knows you explicitly ingore the
>> return value, you didn't forget it by mistake.
>
> Does anyone know how relevant this is in practice,
> given in mistakes per product, or increased development
> cost?

Not very relevant IMHO, because Ada programmers, knowing that return
values cannot be ignored, design functions in such a way that the
returned value is sufficiently interesting that the caller will not
want to ignore it. In the few cases I've seen where the value is
actually ignored, there was always a comment explaining why, and this
was usually a symptom of poor design of the function.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.