Re: Hungarian notation

[kanze@lts.sel.alcatel.de (James Kanze US/ESC 60/3/141 #40763)]

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In article <TANMOY.96May17072919@qcd.lanl.gov> tanmoy@qcd.lanl.gov
(Tanmoy Bhattacharya) writes:

|> In article <319B2494.68AB@platsol.com>
|> Dave Toland <det@platsol.com> writes:

|> DT: usage of the variables.  And for C, it probably is not a "wrong"
|> choice, particularly 
|> DT: when there are functions called without prototype declarations,
|> and functions like 
|> DT: printf that cannot match the argument types to the formatting templates at
|> DT: compile time.

|> "cannot" is too strong. The C language clearly allows the compiler to
|> know about standard library functions like printf. In fact at least
|> one free compiler does check the arguments against the formatting
|> directive, and more should do.

This must be an amazingly brillant compiler, since the format strings
are almost always the result of a call to gettext (or its equivalent on
non-Unix systems), which means that they are read from an external file
which generally won't even exist on the machine which is doing the
compiling.  Or does this compiler also know the semantics of gettext,
and simply suppose that the translators won't screw it up.  (Wishful
thinking, of course.  But I guess it really is too much to ask for a
warning along the lines of: ``Warning: the translator who does the
Estonian localization 5 years from now will accidentally change the %d
into a %s.'')

This isn't to say I approve of Hungarian notation, even in C and used
with printf.  Nor to criticize a compiler from generating a warning on
obviously bad code.  Just that this warning won't really be as useful
as one would like in commercial software.
-- 
James Kanze         Tel.: (+33) 88 14 49 00        email: kanze@gabi-soft.fr
GABI Software, Sarl., 8 rue des Francs-Bourgeois, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
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