Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!oddjob!gargoyle!att!ihnp4!poseidon!ech
From: ech@poseidon.UUCP (Edward C Horvath)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: LSC almost gets it right.
Message-ID: <490@poseidon.UUCP>
Date: 7 Sep 88 14:16:54 GMT
References: <5077@fluke.COM>
Organization: AT&T Information Systems, Lincroft, NJ
Lines: 27

From article <5077@fluke.COM>, by mce@tc.fluke.COM (Brian McElhinney):
> In article <670@mailrus.cc.umich.edu> shane@um.cc.umich.edu (Shane Looker) writes:
>>The manual clearly states that the MacTraps calls do not have prototypes.
>>
>>You can add prototypes with no problem.
 
> Documenting a bug does not make it a feature (the Require Prototypes option
> should *require* prototypes for *all* routines; anything less is a bug).
 
What drives me NUTS about LSC prototyping (at least in 2.x: my check for 3.0
cleared the bank three weeks ago, Symantec, where's my upgrade???) is the
SILENT coercion of (incorrect) arguments.  Example: you pass 0 for the space
parameter to NewWindow.  This is an error, folks, it needs to be NIL or NULL
or, in any case, a LONG zero.  LSC is happy to silently notice that
the value ought to be long, and indeed generates code to push a long zero.

Great.  Unless you have hopes of sharing your code with ANYBODY who doesn't
have LSC.  Now Symantec/Think may just snicker because this misfeature
makes it even easier to write code -- incorrect, but acceptable to LSC,
code -- and harder to port it to another compiler.  But it's MY code, and
I reserve the right to own more than one compiler.

I'd rather be warned about type mismatches, and I'd be happy to turn on a
"picky, picky, picky!" option if there were one.  Meantime it just makes
me paranoid...

=Ned=