From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2001-10-27T04:10:02+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23493] Re: Issues with white space [was Re: Bruce Eckel's opinion of Ruby]

On Sat, 27 Oct 2001, Pixel wrote:

> I think the easiest way to catch this is to warn for unused constants alike
> C's compiler:
>
> % echo 'int main() { 1 ; return 0; }' > /tmp/t.c && gcc -Wall /tmp/t.c
> /tmp/t.c:1: warning: statement with no effect

This is not as easy as it sounds:

  1 + 1                  # statement has no effect
  class Fixnum
    alias_method :plus, :+
    def +(other)
      $foo = other
      plus(other)
    end
  end
  1 + 1                  # statement has a side-effect
  p $foo                 # this should print 1

Perhaps you may argue that this is a bad idea in the first place, and
maybe it is.  My point, though, is that anything in Ruby can have a
side-effect, so while a warning might be useful to one person, it might
disgust someone else.

Perhaps Ruby should have different warning levels?

Paul