> To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions.
Yes, I'm not arguing against such warnings in general. I'm arguing against pure coding style type warnings.
Here's an example: If you do an '==' comparison inside an if, you might accidentally type '=' instead, making it a perfectly valid assignment.
The gcc developers eventually decided to issue a warning if you do an assignment inside an 'if' conditional, but give you the option to put another set of parantheses around if that's really what you want to do here. I think this is perfectly reasonable.
However, in the mean time, a lot of people have decided to adapt a coding style where you always put the constant or literal on the left hand side if possible, to avoid this issue. In theory, the gcc developers could in addition also have opted to issue warnings for comparisons if the left hand side is an lvalue and the right hand side a constant or literal, that you might want to flip it around. Thus enforcing a "safer coding style" through compiler warnings.
I'm arguing that the former is a perfectly reasonable thing for a compiler to do, while the later isn't.
> To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions.