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From: Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com>
To: arnold@skeeve.com
Cc: tuhs@tuhs.org, doug@cs.dartmouth.edu
Subject: Re: [TUHS] reviving a bit of WWB
Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2020 14:28:04 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <04211470-AD63-452A-A0BB-6A7A6FD85AAE@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <202009201842.08KIgn2f022401@freefriends.org>

When I read Doug’s message. I figured it was sarcasm related to the voluminous warnings that are generated these days and was harkening back to some paper Lorinda Cherry wrote about how they were needless additions to the perfection that was the original C compiler (that’s sarcasm) that I had never seen before. When you responded as you did, i began to realize the error of my conception :). If I’m. understanding now, Doug wants to resurrect the Writer’s workbench amalgamation of tools, most of which were written by Lorinda Cherry and he’s wanting to eliminate all of gcc’s warnings. I suppose Lorinda Cherry might actually have approved of -Wall in principle, as there is a strong parallelism between grammars here.

When I teach student to use -Wall (with clang), I tell them that it’s very handy to see all of the warnings, but to only address those that they feel are value add, so to speak. I give the same advice to the writers I advise... just cuz Word tells you not to use passive voice, doesn’t mean that it isn’t often appropriate. One specific gcc/clang warning that I get a lot goes like this:

while(entry = getutxent()){
    // Do stuff with entry;
}

Sure, it’s a tricky bit, but the printed fix is to add a set of do nothing parens:

while((entry = getutxent()))

Hardly edifying :).

Much better would ve the explicit compare:

while((entry = getutxent()) != NULL)

But even that implies the programmer isn’t capable of differentiating = and ==.

That said, most -Wall stuff is ok, and I’d love to see an up to date wwb kit with few to no warnings!

Good luck,

Will



Sent from my iPhone

> On Sep 20, 2020, at 1:42 PM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> 
>> I would like to revive Lorinda Cherry's "parts".
>> Implicit in "revival" is dispelling the hundreds
>> of warnings from  gcc -Wpedantic -Wall -Wextra.
>> Has anybody done this already?
>> 
>> Doug
> 
> I haven't tried this. I do suggest starting with 'gcc -m32' so that
> you're not fighting 64 bit issues at the same time as everything else.
> 
> HTH,
> 
> Arnold

  reply	other threads:[~2020-09-20 19:28 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 60+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-09-19  1:51 Doug McIlroy
2020-09-20 18:42 ` arnold
2020-09-20 19:28   ` Will Senn [this message]
2020-09-20 20:12     ` Steve Nickolas
2020-09-20 20:26       ` Doug McIlroy
2020-09-20 20:57         ` Doug McIlroy
2020-09-20 22:13           ` Clem Cole
2020-09-21 20:43             ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2020-09-20 20:58         ` Steve Nickolas
2020-09-20 21:33           ` Brantley Coile
2020-10-07  5:43             ` scj
2020-09-20 21:35           ` John Cowan
2021-02-02 23:08             ` Greg A. Woods
2021-02-02 23:47               ` Larry McVoy
2021-02-03  0:11                 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-02-03  0:19                   ` Larry McVoy
2021-02-03  2:04                     ` Richard Salz
2021-02-03  3:32                       ` Dave Horsfall
2021-02-03  4:32                         ` M Douglas McIlroy
2021-02-03 11:27                           ` Peter Jeremy via TUHS
2021-02-03 20:09                             ` Dave Horsfall
2021-02-03 20:13                               ` Niklas Karlsson
2021-02-03 23:46                               ` Tom Lyon
2021-02-03 22:19                           ` Dave Horsfall
2021-02-03 22:55                             ` M Douglas McIlroy
2020-09-20 22:15           ` Clem Cole
2020-09-20 22:47             ` John Cowan
2020-09-21 20:48               ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2020-09-21 20:46           ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2020-09-24  2:25       ` Dave Horsfall
2020-09-24  2:33         ` Clem Cole
2020-09-25  0:18           ` [TUHS] One's complement (was: reviving a bit of WWB) Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-09-25  0:22             ` Warner Losh
2020-09-25  1:39               ` John Cowan
2020-09-27  5:54           ` [TUHS] reviving a bit of WWB Dave Horsfall
2020-09-24 17:19         ` Paul Winalski
2020-09-24 18:17           ` John Cowan
2020-10-07  5:47   ` scj
2020-10-07  9:20     ` arnold
2020-10-08  0:27     ` Dave Horsfall
2020-10-08  3:08       ` John Cowan
2020-09-20 22:51 Norman Wilson
2020-09-20 23:00 Norman Wilson
2020-09-20 23:53 ` Clem Cole
2020-09-21  0:00   ` Clem Cole
2020-09-21  2:24     ` John Cowan
2020-09-21  0:09   ` Warner Losh
2020-09-21  1:05     ` Clem Cole
2020-09-21  5:55     ` Steve Nickolas
2020-09-21  5:59       ` Warner Losh
2020-09-21 18:40         ` Paul Winalski
2020-09-21 19:56           ` Dan Cross
2020-09-21 20:50       ` John Cowan
2020-09-21 21:22         ` Rob Pike
2020-09-21 21:57           ` Clem Cole
2020-09-21 23:56             ` John Cowan
2020-09-22  0:54               ` Richard Salz
2020-09-21 21:39         ` Steve Nickolas
2020-09-25 14:19 Doug McIlroy
2020-09-28 17:35 ` Angelo Papenhoff

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