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From: faustus@ucbcad.berkeley.edu (Wayne A. Christopher)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Check the Arg Count
Message-ID: <1193@ucbcad.berkeley.edu>
Date: Fri, 2-Jan-87 13:09:42 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbcad.1193
Posted: Fri Jan  2 13:09:42 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 2-Jan-87 20:54:20 EST
References: <3214@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <4900@mimsy.UUCP>
Organization: CAD Group, U.C. Berkeley
Lines: 20

In article <4900@mimsy.UUCP>, mangoe@mimsy.UUCP (Charley Wingate) writes:
> You still haven't explained why lint as a processor should be logically and
> functionally distinct from cc as a processor.  The ONLY reason I can see for
> separating them is so that you don't have to be confronted with messages
> telling you that you're writng tricky or otherwise dubious code.

Most of the things lint points out either aren't available to ccom, or
are definitely not appropriate.  How is ccom going to know what is in
the other files that I'm going to link with?  Detection of incompatible
arguments, return values, etc across modules is lint's most useful
function.  Also, so you really want ccom to tell you that you haven't
used some of the variables you declare?  Then there are things that are
technically portability problems, but are unavoidable -- for instance,
when I assign a long to an int, lint will complain about it, but if I
can't change the types of the variables and I know that the magnitude
of the long will be <= the magnitude of a short, I'll just put #ifndef
LINT around that statement and get rid of the warnings.  If ccom
complained about it I couldn't do that.

	Wayne