On Tue, 18 Dec 2012, David A. Wheeler wrote:

Compiler warning flags cost nearly nothing to turn on when you're *starting* a project, but they're harder to enable later (a thousand warnings about the same thing later is harder than fixing it the first time). And while some warnings are nonsense, their use can make the resulting software much, much better. If we got people to turn on warning flags all over the place, during development, a lot of bugs would simply disappear.

What might actually happen is that a bunch of casts get added to the code in order to quench the warnings. These casts cause new bugs when the code is updated or they hide later attempts to find conversion issues.

It is pretty common that the person trying to eliminate a warning does not understand the code well enough to understand the consequences of their action or is interested in a quick fix.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

_______________________________________________
Autoconf mailing list
Autoconf@gnu.org
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf

Reply via email to