"Yet Another Mike" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I'm told Tabnanny was inspired by lint, the Unix utiltity to check C sources > (and probably others). Lint was primarily useful in days long ago when CPUs > were slow and a compile used a significant amount of resources. In a > multiuser environment (we ran an Intel 286 in multiuser mode!!), the > compiles could bring everyone else to a crawl. Lint was used because it was > a less-CPU intensive way to catch bonehead errors and fix them before using > precious compile time.
Originally, lint caught errors the C compiler didn't flag as errors. For example: int *main = { ..... } ; The C compiler would build and link that just fine on v7. lint would complain about it. Of course, if you used the right ints to fill the array, it would produce a valid executable. <mike -- Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list