From: Nikolai Weibull <mailing-lists.ruby-core@...>
Date: 2005-04-29T00:53:43+09:00
Subject: Re: -Wall

Vincent Isambart, April 29:

> > When are warnings a bad thing?  It's not like they stop things from
> > compiling, and they'll assist in the testing of not well tested
> > systems,

> I never said that warnings are a bad thing. It's a good tool for
> developers.

(I wasn't confroning you personally, if that's how you interpreted it.)

> I just said that end users do not necessarily have to see them. A
> developer might not mind but an end user might wonder that these
> strange warnings are, whether Ruby will work fine or not...

How often do end users actually see these errors?  And if they
do, they're probably curious enough to actually want to see them and
perhaps they'll even report them to the developers, when they do.

Knowing that there are problems with the code and lying about it to the
people who compiles it doesn't seem right to me.  I use the following
set of -W's for all my projects: -Wall -W -Wwrite-strings
-Waggregate-return -Wmissing-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations
-Wnested-externs -Wundef -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-align -Wshadow -Werror.
This makes sure that I know of any potential problems that the compiler
was smart enough to pick up.  It won't make my code bug-free, but at
least it'll make me sleep better at night, knowing that I tried my very
best,
        nikolai

-- 
Nikolai Weibull: now available free of charge at http://bitwi.se/!
Born in Chicago, IL USA; currently residing in Gothenburg, Sweden.
main(){printf(&linux["\021%six\012\0"],(linux)["have"]+"fun"-97);}