Small poll

[James Hague]

Joachim Durchholz wrote:
>Warnings are useful for those things that
>newbies often fall trap to:  these should be
>warnings. Or at least warnings that can be
>switched on using a compiler option.

I agree in principle, but then you see newbies making errors that you 
can't check for:

	second([x,y|t]) -> y.

Where x, y, and t were intended to be variables, not atoms.  Or using 
"/" instead of "div".  Or the more common case of calling an external 
function with the wrong number of parameters, or simply a non-
existant external function (which, I admit, would be nice to check 
for, though not so simple).  It's a slippery slope to try to fix all 
of these at compile time, and it isn't clear that an overly pedantic 
compiler is a worthy goal.  There should at least be consistent 
principles for what is warned about and what isn't.

That said, I still like the new warning for "This statement will 
never match," maybe just because I've seen similar warnings in ML-
like languages.