Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!yale!mintaka!spdcc!ima!haddock!karl
From: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Does LINT understand ANSI prototyping?
Message-ID: <18633@haddock.ima.isc.com>
Date: 25 Oct 90 03:38:02 GMT
References: <1990Oct24.183836.24082@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: karl@ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Cambridge, MA 02138-5302
Lines: 32

In article <1990Oct24.183836.24082@portia.Stanford.EDU> rstanton@portia.Stanford.EDU (Richard Stanton) writes:
>Does LINT not understand ANSI prototypes?

Yes it does, but only if you have the latest version of lint (it's in SVR4).
If you only have access to a pre-ANSI lint, you'll have to hide the prototypes
from it.  (I'll assume that there are no ANSIisms other than the prototypes;
if this is not the case you've got more trouble than I can help you with.)

If the only prototypes are in the header files, then I recommend you rewrite
them to look like this:
	#if defined(__STDC__)
	extern set_t mkset(void);
	extern bool is_empty(set_t);
	extern void add_to(void const *, set_t *);
	#else
	extern set_t mkset();
	extern bool is_empty();
	extern void add_to();
	#endif
(Some people prefer to use a single set of declarations with magic macros that
expand into either an empty pair of parentheses or the appropriate arglist; I
don't like that convention.)

In actual source code that you have to maintain, it can be painful and ugly to
support both prototyped and old-style declarations; in this case I prefer to
maintain the code with prototypes and, when the code needs to be viewed by a
pre-ANSI tool, filter it through a deprotoizer.  One such is "unprotoize",
which hangs off of gcc and should be available in the various GNU archives.  I
maintain a less powerful one that's entirely self-contained (available on
request, but it's tuned to my personal coding style).

Karl W. Z. Heuer (karl@ima.isc.com or uunet!ima!karl), The Walking Lint