[Snowball-discuss] Problems with -Wall flag

[Neal Richter]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Olly Betts wrote:

> > I also get these errors in the C code generated:
>
> Coding standards are for humans.  Insisting machine-generated code
> conforms to coding standards is foolish - the fact that Snowball
> compiles via C is really just an implementation detail (like the
> fact GCC compiles to machine code via assembly language - does
> your organisation insist that the assembly code GCC generates
> meets your coding standards?)

  Is this a thank you for the polite input?

  10 of the 14 errors reported were not machine generated.

  I made no claim for coding standards for machine-generated code.  In
general, enforcing any kind of style on this type of code is silly and
fairly hard.  Correctness is the only real metric, and efficiency is a
consideration.

  Note that the 'unused variable m' error at a minimum results in several
meaningless machine instructions.  Keeping track of when/if it is used is
hard, so I have no problem if you want to ignore it.

  Thanks for all your hard work on Snowball.

Neal Richter
Knowledgebase Developer
RightNow Technologies, Inc.
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