Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!mintaka!ai-lab!life!burley From: burley@albert.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Craig Burley) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: A Question of Style Message-ID: Date: 24 May 91 14:50:23 GMT References: <1991May21.140440.16964@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <1991May21.180713.1602@unixg.ubc.ca> <1991May23.144750.20941@ncsa.uiuc.edu> Sender: news@ai.mit.edu Organization: Free Software Foundation 545 Tech Square Cambridge, MA 02139 Lines: 22 In-reply-to: hirchert@ncsa.uiuc.edu's message of 23 May 91 14:47:50 GMT In article <1991May23.144750.20941@ncsa.uiuc.edu> hirchert@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Kurt Hirchert) writes: On the question of unreferenced statement labels in a FORTRAN program, no one has mentioned that in some cases these labels are inserted so they can be referenced by a debugger (e.g., to set a breakpoint). Yes, I have done this many times, and typically when compiling for debugging I WANT messages about uninitialized variables and other "suspicious" but statically (compile-time) valid things the compiler is able to notice. But getting a bunch of messages about unreferenced labels at the same time would make the compiler fairly useless, because I do not want to wade through the useless messages to find the useful ones, or my time is wasted. I do remember a PL/I compiler I used did complain about unreferenced labels I inserted so I could create debugger shell scripts that tested a multi-process program I built, or some such thing. The messages were very annoying for the reasons I mention above, and I think the compiler developers agreed they were silly and removed them. PL/I isn't much different from Fortran in this respect. -- James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson burley@gnu.ai.mit.edu