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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: impossible problem for find(1)?
Message-ID: <5832@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 5-May-87 17:36:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.5832
Posted: Tue May  5 17:36:55 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 7-May-87 04:08:24 EDT
References: <2645@phri.UUCP> <6454@mimsy.UUCP> <5797@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 25

In article <477@haddock.UUCP> karl@haddock.ISC.COM.UUCP (Karl Heuer) writes:
>...  For example, "int nullf() {}" is acceptable to the lint I just
>tried, and is still legitimate in X3J11 unless they've changed recently.

What X3J11 says is that any use by the caller of the return value of
such a function produces undefined behavior (as, logically, it should).
If the caller doesn't use the value, then it's legal portable C.

There are several versions of "lint", with different ideas of what
should be checked by default.  The one I usually use doesn't complain
about the above example (nor the original newer.c with /*NOTREACHED*/
after the last exit() call), but I would consider such a complaint
legitimate and therefore took defensive measures in advance.  Perhaps
someone (even I) may change "lint" to complain about such usage.

"Lint" is permitted, nay, encouraged to check for possible problems
that are nonetheless legal C usage.  It is almost always an error in
MY code for a function to be declared to return a value but to fail
to do so, just as it's almost always an error for MY code to not use
the value returned by a function.  This is a consequence of a coding
style that tries to be as type-correct as possible.  To the extent
that "lint" supports such a style, it can help find coding errors.

Actually all #ifdef lint stuff is ugly, and I would have removed it
before posting the code had I guessed that a discussion was imminent.