Wish: Variable Not Used Warning

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Walter Bright" <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:g530j8$18th$1 at digitalmars.com...
> The reason for treating warnings as errors when warnings are enabled is so 
> that, for a long build, they don't scroll up and off your screen and go 
> unnoticed.

Pardon me for saying so, but that doesn't sound like a very convincing 
reason to turn every warning (which, by it's very nature, is something that 
might not be a bug) into something that splits the language into what are 
effectively different languages.

In all the time I've spent using Microsoft compilers, I've found the "x 
number of errors, y number of warnings" display at the end of every compile 
to be perfectly sufficient for the problem you point out. If a build 
involves many different calls to a compiler, then whatever rebuild-like tool 
is being used could be made to screen-scrape and total up the warnings and 
errors. Or the compiler could stick the error/warning counts along in an 
output file that gets read and accumulated by the rebuild/make tool. Or a 
copy of all the output could just be piped into a "grep for the 
error/warning counts" tool. This way, DMD's warnings could be lint-like 
warnings instead of the language-splitting "optional errors" (which I can 
understand your reluctance to create more of) that they are now. A "treat 
warnings as errors" flag could be retained for any large builds that involve 
multiple compiler invokations but for some reason still don't do any form of 
proper cumulative "x warnings / x errors".