Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!sun-barr!newstop!texsun!texbell!nuchat!moray!urchin!p6.f506.n106.z1.fidonet.org!Bob.Stout
From: Bob.Stout@p6.f506.n106.z1.fidonet.org (Bob Stout)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: lint won't verify printf formatting against variable types??
Message-ID: <16398.24B11BB6@urchin.fidonet.org>
Date: 4 Jul 89 08:20:45 GMT
Sender: ufgate@urchin.fidonet.org (newsout1.26)
Organization: FidoNet node 1:106/506.6 - Fulcrum's Edge, Spring TX
Lines: 29

In an article of <28 Jun 89 08:32:33 GMT>, Goran Larsson writes:

 >In article <105@borabora.omni.com> bob@omni.com (Bob Weissman) writes:
 >>Last week I spent an entire day tracking down one of those bugs you just
 >>don't see after staring at your code too long.  It was of the form:
 >>
 >>       if (condition);
 >>           action;
 >
 >It's your own fault -- you should have written it as
 >        if ( condition ) {
 >                action;
 >        }
 >to reduce the risk of errors!
 >
 >>My lint (SunOS 4.0.1 version) did not flag the extra semicolon.
 >
 >It isn't supposed to find this "error" as it is legal C.

  Walter Bright offers us PC-C'ers a worthwhile feature in the Zortech C  
preprocessor:

        if (condition);         /* issues a warning     */
        if (condition) ;        /* issues no warning    */

  Although this is of marginal usefulness in `if' statements, it's quite  
useful when using `for' or `while' statements with null operations to simply  
preset an index or to perform some operation which may be contained within the  
body of the `for' statement.