Small poll

[James Hague]

Robert Virding wrote:
>2. Many of the warnings generated by the
>compiler have been chosen in an extremely
>ad hoc fashion, they were deemed useful by
>someone and easy to implement. There is
>really no clear policy for what is checked
>and what is not. I mean why check the
>arguments to io:format and not a host of
>other common library functions.

I tried to make this point in an earlier message, though I may not 
have succeeded.  I don't really want to see the compiler cluttered up 
with a lot of checks for things that may or may not be errors, 
especially when:

1. There are many more things that are not checked (for example, any 
place where a newbie types "x" instead of "X").  Trying to catch them 
all seems like a long and unproductive road to go down.  (Okay, I 
once complained about list comprehensions without generators being 
quietly compiled, but I'd argue that's invalid Erlang.)

2.  Simple, interactive testing catches all of these errors anyway, 
even the ones that aren't warned about. 

Additionally, I think Erlang--both the language and implementation--
are on the verge of becoming too complicated.  I think both could use 
some streamlining.  Adding ad hoc warnings is a step in the other 
direction.