Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Is this a bug in some C compilers?
Message-ID: <10572@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 20 Jul 89 23:31:13 GMT
References: <800@sbsvax.UUCP> <10561@smoke.BRL.MIL> <18648@mimsy.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 17

In article <18648@mimsy.UUCP> chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
>In article <10561@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>>A standard-conforming compiler is required to diagnose such misusage.
>I thought the wording was ... which seems to say that the compiler is
>required to print *some* warning, but not necessarily one about this
>in particular (it could say `warning, this code smells musty' :-) ).

Yes, the Standard does not attempt to be too specific about what
diagnostic messages must look like and other such environmental matters.
It does require that such misusage produce a diagnostic that is clearly
recognizable as a diagnostic (well, the "clearly recognizable" is more
the intent than the specification).  A conforming compiler COULD simply
report only: "foo.c: at least one error detected".  (It must NOT report
the same form of diagnostic for a strictly-conforming program, although
it is free to generate additional, distinguishable, diagnostics.)  We
generally label such things a matter of "quality of implementation",
leaving it up to market pressure to get the vendors to do a good job.