Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!occrsh!uokmax!munnari.oz.au!metro!usage.csd.unsw.oz.au!spectrum!cameron
From: cameron@usage.csd.oz (Cameron Simpson,Uhmmm..???? Who knows)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: How ANSI is Apollo's cc 6.7 (SR 10.2)
Message-ID: <848@usage.csd.unsw.oz.au>
Date: 12 Sep 90 06:47:41 GMT
References: <HANCHE.90Sep11182351@hufsa.imf.unit.no>
Sender: news@usage.csd.unsw.oz.au
Reply-To: cameron@spectrum.cs.unsw.oz.au (Cameron Simpson)
Organization: none
Lines: 20

From article <HANCHE.90Sep11182351@hufsa.imf.unit.no>, by hanche@imf.unit.no (Harald Hanche-Olsen):
| In article <847@usage.csd.unsw.oz.au> cameron@usage.csd.oz (Cameron Simpson) writes:
|    Rumour hath it that 10.3 has an ANSI compiler. That would be nice.
|    A better lint would be nice, too.
| Then rumour is unprecise.  [more detailed compiler info ...]
| By the way, I would have thought that type
| checking and the proper use of function prototypes would help to make
| lint obsolete?

Prototypes are a great help. But lint does much more than this.
It catches miscellaneous conflicting unprototyped functions.
It catches unportable code. It catches uninitialised and unused variables.
And so on. It would be nice if the compiler caught some of these.
Some of these checks (IMHO) don't belong in the compiler, and should stay
in lint. Some of these checks _can't_ be caught by the compiler in a
convenient fashion (eg cross checking).

I like lint.
	- Cameron Simpson
	  cameron@spectrum.cs.unsw.oz.au