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From: olson@endor.harvard.edu (Eric Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Function prototypes (was: miscellaneous unrelated stuff)
Message-ID: <1821@husc6.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 1-May-87 12:47:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: husc6.1821
Posted: Fri May  1 12:47:39 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 2-May-87 17:08:47 EDT
References: <18346@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <7973@utzoo.UUCP> <796@rtech.UUCP>
Sender: news@husc6.UUCP
Reply-To: olson@endor.UUCP (Eric Olson)
Organization: Aiken Computation Lab Harvard, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 26

In article <796@rtech.UUCP> jas@rtech.UUCP (Jim Shankland) writes:
>
>Henry Spencer (utzoo!henry) notes in passing:
>
>> [Function prototypes] have other problems, and I'm not sure they were a
>> good idea....
>
>This got me curious:  what are the problems with function prototypes?
...
>Are there additional arguments against function prototypes?  If so,
>what are they?

I have a big complaint about function prototypes.  I would very much like
all the functions in my code to have prototypes accessible from any other
module, essentially so I get lint-like argument checking during compile.
(I am using LightSpeed C on the Macintosh-- don't yell at me, but it has no
lint.  It does have an option to require prototypes).  So I can prototype
everything in a header file included in all my modules, but then adding a
module forces a complete re-make.

Am I missing something?  Is there a sane way to use prototypes (I already
use them on libraries, since they rarely change).

Any ideas will be appreciated.

-Eric