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From: jlol@REMUS.EE.BYU.EDU (Jay Lawlor)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: C++Lint thingees (was: Re: Smart Pointers -- A proposed language extension)
Message-ID: <9102060507.AA24293@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 6 Feb 91 05:05:25 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: jlol@ee.byu.edu
Lines: 31

>>>>> On 5 Feb 91 21:07:09 GMT, purtill@morley.rutgers.edu (Mark Purtill) said:

Mark> rfg@NCD.COM (Ron Guilmette) writes:
>I consider it to be a fundamental part of the job of a "compiler" to
>perform a good deal of "checking" on the programs (or sub-hunks of
>programs) that I feed it.  Placing some of the checking into a separate
>tool is like inviting somebody to write crappy code. 

Mark> 	It also invites compiler suppliers to either not supply the
Mark> 'lint'oid and/or charging more money for it (which means some users do
Mark> without).  If the checking is in the standard, this is at least less
Mark> likely to happen (although I can see vendors advertising "standard
Mark> compatibility" add-on programs and rubbish like that).

Which reminds me...
It really irks me when a company sells you the "default" compiler with
their system and then says, "but if you want xx% better performance
you should buy our super optimizing compiler."  In other words, "since
we have a lousy compiler that doesn't really take advantage of the
machine we sold you we'd like to make it up to you by selling you
something else."  This could extend to other "essential" tools which
should come with the system.  (flame avoidance: I'm not talking about
DOS machines here since nothing really "comes with the system" anyway.
Also, I'm not saying a lot of companies do this but I've seen it before.)

Anyway, back to the subject.  I don't know if this has been mentioned
but I always thought one nice feature of lint was to tell you about
variables that are defined but never used.  It doesn't affect your
code performance or correctness but it does help clean up and improve
readability, etc.  Are there compilers (c++, ANSI C, whatever) which
perform this function?