[TUHS] reviving a bit of WWB

[Will Senn]

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 at skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> Doug McIlroy <doug at 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