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To: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
cc: jmacd@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Josh MacDonald), bde@zeta.org.au,
        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: GNU binutils port 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 24 Apr 1996 21:27:21 +0930."
             <199604241157.VAA19097@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> 
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 1996 08:28:06 -0700
Message-ID: <11585.830359686@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> gcc -Wall is _pedantic_.  Consider how many of the above are 
> "Consider parentheses around assignment used as truth value", or
> "Integer used as pointer without a cast" (for use of '0' as a [legitimate]
> substitute for NULL.

Well, I think one needs to step back a bit at some point in any debate
of this nature and ask a more fundamental question:

	"Just what are we trying to accomplish here?"

With -Wall, I can only tell you what *I'm* trying to accomplish.  What
you may wish to accomplish may not jibe at all with this, and if a
debate does nothing more than establish that early on then it's
accomplished more than most debates.

I use -Wall in order to help me find stupid bugs in my code.  It's
actually pretty good at this, and so I use it.  In order to use it, I
also add things like extra parentheses around assignment expressions
(and, given that I also happen to *prefer* the: ``if ((blah = frob())
!= bar)'' style, that's scarcely a hardship) and basically do whatever
else I need to do to make the fool thing happy.  That's just part of
the price for using the tool, same as with any tool.

						Jordan