Xref: utzoo comp.lang.c:33345 alt.religion.computers:1985 Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aipna!rjc From: rjc@uk.ac.ed.cstr (Richard Caley) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,alt.religion.computers Subject: Re: ANSI C prototypes Message-ID: Date: 1 Nov 90 14:52:11 GMT References: <1005@christopher-robin.cs.bham.ac.uk> <1906@necisa.ho.necisa.oz> Sender: news@aipna.ed.ac.uk Organization: Center for Speech Technology Research Lines: 26 In-reply-to: boyd@necisa.ho.necisa.oz's message of 31 Oct 90 00:49:17 GMT In article <1906@necisa.ho.necisa.oz> boyd@necisa.ho.necisa.oz (Boyd Roberts) writes: Right on! The function prototypes are just stupid. I shouldn't have to go: extern gore *good(const char *vomit); to get the functionality of type checking of function arguments. The compiler and loader should do it. Ok, so what happens to code which never sees the loader? I want my errors when I compile things, not when some poor guy tries to use it. Even in less extreme cases, having the loader do all the checking would mean you got no error checking until you did a full compile and link. For even fairly small programs that will be unacceptable ``Well, yeah, we really do need the cray, we have to recompile the entire system every three minutes during development.'' Which is not to say that the linker shouldn't _also_ check the types. So should the run time system and the disc driver, if I had my way :-) -- rjc@uk.ac.ed.cstr Paranoid of Leith