machine generated code and chatty compilers

[Bill Smith]

In article <923 at thor.wright.EDU>, econrad at thor.wright.edu (Eric Conrad) writes:
> From article <1471 at mdbs.UUCP>, by wsmith at mdbs.UUCP (Bill Smith):
> > For those helpful souls that wish their C or C++ compiler to generate
> > helpful warning messages in contexts that are technically correct, I 
> > have another argument that that is inherently a bad idea.
> 
> So turn the warning suppression flag on for automatic-generated code.

On the surface this sounds like a good idea, but the command to turn
of the warnings (when done with a much care as is deserved) will be
incredible complicated to use.

How do you decide which subset of the warning messages to suppress?

To suppress all warnings may hide useful and pertinent warning but
different programming groups may all have mutually disjoint definitions
of "pertinent warnings."

Lint suffers from this effect too.  You can't tweak it to omit just the set
of errors that you don't care to see.

Bill Smith
pur-ee!mdbs!wsmith