Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!ima!haddock!suitti
From: suitti@haddock.ISC.COM (Steve Uitti)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Turbo Pascal - Am I Nuts?
Message-ID: <5870@haddock.ISC.COM>
Date: 5 Aug 88 20:59:59 GMT
References: <7536@cup.portal.com> <6860013@vx2.GBA.NYU.EDU> <12934@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: suitti@haddock.ima.isc.com (Steve Uitti)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 36

>Have Macintosh programmers forgotten about lint?  I've been wondering
>why I have to find my mistakes when the computer could be doing it for
>me.
>On the other hand, I'll choose LSC (TC?) over any system I've used
>that has lint.  I just don't understand why I can't have both.

	I use lint *all the time* on UNIX.  I've yet to find a lint
that matched the native C compiler very well lately.  For example, the
PDP-11 lint was based on pcc, not Ritchie's C - the native version.
On BSD systems or Sys V systems that have flexnames C compilers, lint
is still limited to 8 chararcters.  Further, I've yet to see a lint
library for libc that resembles reality.  For all of this, lint is
typically useful.

	Under TurboC, for the PC, one can turn on all sorts of
additional error checking.  It performs as well or better than the
best lints I've used.  It doesn't seem to slow down compilation
significantly.  Therefore, I turn on everything, and use it all the
time.  If you turn on required prototypes, you find all sorts of
things (even though it is a pain to get it all right - once).
Porting old highly ported stuff to TurboC from UNIX has actually
pointed out undiscovered bugs!  Amazing.

	LSC has an option for required prototypes, which I've only
just started to use.  So far, it does everything I'd want lint to do.
You want to avoid int/long or int/pointer cast portability problems?
LSC has smaller ints than long or char *, thus complains bitterly.

	In summary, having lint be seperate from the C compiler is a
bad idea.  Having lint libraries that are not used for production is
bad.  Having prototypes in header files that are used for all
compilations is infinitly better.  The bugs are caught and found
early, rather than never (I don't have time to fix this obvious lint
library bug... it doesn't prevent the code from working...).

	Stephen Uitti