On 04/05/2012 02:45 PM, Eric Botcazou wrote:
I personally don't buy the "can't remember" argument. When you use
GCC, you just have to remember -g, -O, -W and that's pretty much it.
It is not that they can't remember. I am a TA at a moderately basic
programming course,
and student submit home assignments with horrible errors. These errors,
such as
free(*str) or *str=malloc(n) are easily be caught by -Wall. I have to
remember to
advise them to use -Wall and to fix all the warnings, which I sometimes
forget to do.
Many of the students don't know of -Wall because they don't read the gcc
manual,
either because they are overwhelmed with assignments and exams, or because
they are intimidated by big manuals written in technical English. Either
way, many
won't use -Wall unless they are told to.
My conclusion: it would be much better for beginners to have more
warnings turned on.
<rant>
As for specific warnings, I hate that the the code (a&&b || c&&d), which
did not cause a
warning on older gcc version now gives a warning. I would not want it on
by default since
it forces users to write too many parentheses in ((a&&b)||(c&&d)) which
makes the expression
less readable. What next? Warn about (a*b+c*d) ? I would hate to write
((a*b)+(c*d)).
Sure, the precedence of: << vs. +; & vs. == ; & vs. && ; is less clear
and deserves a warning,
but: & vs. | ; && vs. || ; are at least as common as * vs. + that
programmers ought to know
them.
</rant>
Michael
