Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!gdt!gdr!exspes
From: exspes@gdr.bath.ac.uk (P E Smee)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: observability
Message-ID: <1989Sep11.092435.21016@gdt.bath.ac.uk>
Date: 11 Sep 89 09:24:35 GMT
References: <1237@gmdzi.UUCP> <10885@smoke.BRL.MIL> <242@ssp1.idca.tds.philips.nl> <10937@smoke.BRL.MIL> <1989Sep6.160709.4890@light.uucp> <1989Sep6.183349.2866@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <28946@news.Think.COM> <1989Sep8.091010.12450@gdt.bath.ac.uk> <10321@csli.Stanfor
Reply-To: exspes@gdr.bath.ac.uk (P E Smee)
Organization: University of Bristol c/o University of Bath
Lines: 26

In article <10321@csli.Stanford.EDU> poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser) writes:
>In article <1989Sep8.091010.12450@gdt.bath.ac.uk> exspes@gdr.bath.ac.uk (P E Smee) writes:
>>one might ask why you would want to write a chunk
>>of code that has ZERO effect.
>
>I sometimes do this during program development. I declare the data
>structures and write the code that operates on them, leaving the i/o
>to worry about later. I may want to compile at this point to check
>for errors in the code.

Well, maybe.  Still, in that case you shouldn't be using an optimizing
pass of the compiler yet, and I at least would claim that a non-optimizing
compiler *shouldn't* go rearranging the code in any significant manner.
(And, I would also assert that a compiler *shouldn't* go throwing away
blocks of code simply because they don't do anything, without warning you
it's doing so -- again on grounds that people don't usually intend their
code to do nothing.)

Alternatively, take that as (yet another) reason for using C rather than
FORTRAN.

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