Re: Another ammunition

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>]

Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote:
> "Eric G. Miller" <egm2.NOSPAM@jps-NOSPAM.net> a �crit dans le message news: IpfQ9.4953
>>>It took a week to understand what was happenning. Would not have passed the
>>>first compilation in Ada. FWIW...
>>
>>You're right, but I'm sure gcc could have immediately diagnosed the
>>problem had you turned up the warnings ("conflicting types for...", "previous
>>declaration of ...").
> 
> Warnings were on, he just overlooked them....
> That's what makes a huge difference between a warning which is up to the good will of the compiler (and the programmer paying
> attention to it), and a *required* compile time error!
> 
> (count that as another moral of the story).

Things may be different now, but I once had a long email discussion
with one of the folks about whether a missing return "type" should
be a warning or not (it should actually be an error). At the time,
you had to specify a compile option to make a declaration like:

foo() { ... }

return a warning. It should be something like:

int foo () { ... }

if it does indeed return int.

Well, he didn't like the idea of the warning being on by default,
and so people continue to get burned by this very problem.

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg