Small poll

[Robert Virding]

This discussion just goes on :-)

I still have not seen any good reasons to change my viewpoint, in fact I have got a few to become even more restrictive:

1. a+42, 1=2, etc are all legal expressions even if they generate errors when evaluated. As errors have meaning in Erlang then you can't just forbid them.

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. Especially considering that io:format is easy to guard against. Richard O'Keefe wrote some good stuff about the problems of getting the right level of checking.

3. With this in mind then Bjorn's new checks are probably a bad idea, the warnings become even more ad hoc and difficult to understand. I wonder if maybe some of the existing warnings should be removed. I still say that many of the warnings give very little and some are a right pain.***

4. You cannot have the option of forbidding legal code, no matter how stupid it may seem. The compiler must handle all legal code. Trying to guess and saying that 90% of the time the user wrote this then they made an error is not good enough. This is similat to the syntax change suggestion concerning =<< made earlier.

5. I wonder if it is good for the compiler to try and use warnings to enforce a certain programming style? 

*** Two warnings that really anoy me are unused vars and unused functions.

I seldom use '_', the anonymous variable, but prefer to give all variables names so I know what they are, even if I don't use them later. I DON'T LIKE the _Varname convention so why should the compiler try and enforce. Of course the alternative would be to ALWAYS use it. That would teach the compiler to mind its own business. :-)

When I define a data structure and its access functions I always define full range of access functions, even those which are not used. I think the structure and how it is intended to be used becomes clearer then. Having the compiler burn me with warnings is irritating to say the least. Yes I can wrap the unused ones in comments but then I don't get any checking. This has been done to me in the compiler code. Anyway what is wrong with defining unused functions? They don't hurt anyone and the compiler removes them from the code anyway.


Robert