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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!emory!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!hamblin.math.byu.edu!news.byu.edu!ns.novell.com!gateway.univel.com!fcom.cc.utah.edu!cs.weber.edu!terry From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) Subject: Re: Prototypes Message-ID: <1993Jun17.210504.22182@fcom.cc.utah.edu> Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu Organization: Weber State University, Ogden, UT References: <1vib9c$oe7@agate.berkeley.edu> <37263@castle.ed.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 17 Jun 93 21:05:04 GMT Lines: 23 In article <37263@castle.ed.ac.uk> richard@castle.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) writes: >In article <1vib9c$oe7@agate.berkeley.edu> wjolitz@soda.berkeley.edu (William F. Jolitz) writes: >>I found that this was well worth the effort, since function prototypes >>and a more formal typechecking proceedures caught quite a number of >>"little" problems. What more can you do here with ANSI C? > >I'd be interested to know whether prototypes gave you any help that >"lint" would not have. Just the opposite actually; lint not only complains about parameter types and count and pointer conversion (with a nicer message than gcc), it also complains about use without prior initialization and other not-so-obvious stuff that doesn't become apparent unless all the code is taken as a whole (something the compiler can't do without smarter linker technology). Lint is a lot better than prototypes for identifying more errors. Terry Lambert terry@icarus.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.