Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!uflorida!haven!ncifcrf!nlm-mcs!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: C function prototyping and large projects
Message-ID: <8597@smoke.ARPA>
Date: 3 Oct 88 03:48:45 GMT
References: <24@motto.UUCP> <3511@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <1281@micomvax.UUCP> <432@thirdi.UUCP> <8032@haddock.ima.isc.com> <435@thirdi.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 12

In article <435@thirdi.UUCP> peter@thirdi.UUCP (Peter Rowell) writes:
>Minor Flame:  I do *not* understand why people seem to feel that there
>is some moral benefit to manual maintenance of information that is
>trivially kept correct by automatic means.  If it is OK for the compiler
>to "automatically" check these things, what is wrong with creating them
>automatically?

In the specific case of function prototypes, if you are following
recommended software engineering procedure, your specification for
function interfaces precedes writing the code to implement (or use)
them.  Automatic generation of prototypes goes in exactly the wrong
direction.