Jon Wilson wrote:
> I would prefer a compiler not to complain about bugs I am already plenty
> aware of. A bug-catching feature is only useful when it catches
> something new and unknown. If I have to do extra work in order to do
> some quick and dirty testing, then the compiler's bug catching features
> have gotten in the way. I think that this is Arthur's POV. Perhaps you
> understand it better now.
I understand it, but it seems an amateurish way of working.
If you have a bug you're plenty aware of, it's almost always easy to
fix it at least to the extent of shutting up the compiler. After all,
people do that every day in C and C++.
I *want* the compiler to catch my bugs when I do some "quick and
dirty testing" so *I* don't have to hunt down trivial bugs.
Some compilers have a way of annotating code to turn off a specific
warning in a specific location. This is useful for the very rare cases
when fixing a particular warning is difficult, in a project which is
built in warnings-are-errors mode.
An exception I can think of is when you've gotten a pile of someone
else's buggy code, and it's hard to fix it all at once.
> I agree that automated bug catching is a useful tool, or a useful
> option. However, perhaps it is not the job of the compiler insofar as
> it is a compiler. I would favor more of a separation of concerns. Let
> the compiler merely compile, and let a lint-like tool catch bugs.
Well, the world has generally moved away from that model. Nowadays
error-checking is built into compilers and/or IDEs. Running a separate
lint step takes longer, and is therefore less likely to be done. And
you want the error-checking on by default *every* time you run the
compiler, so you can catch and fix the errors as quickly as possibly,
when the code is fresh in your mind.
> Perhaps the compiler should invoke the lint, at the user's discretion,
> but I don't think a standard should mandate that a compiler do anything
> other than translate source code into machine code (or bytecode or
> whathaveyou).
The question isn't *mandating* that the compiler do any checking; the
question is *allowing* a compiler to refuse to compile an erroneous
program.
--
--Per Bothner
per_at_bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/
Received on Mon Feb 26 2007 - 03:11:42 UTC