Wish: Variable Not Used Warning

[JAnderson]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> I don't suppose there's any chance of DMD getting a warning for 
>> variables/arguments that are declared but never accessed? Just today 
>> alone there's been two bugs I spent 10-30 minutes going nuts trying to 
>> track down that turned out to be variables I had intended to use but 
>> forgot to. 
> 
> So, why not just turn off the warnings?
> 
> The problem with warnings is that if there are n warnings, there are 
> essentially n factorial different versions of the language. <Snip>

> There is a place for warnings, however. That is in a separate static 
> analysis tool (i.e. lint, coverity, etc.) which can be armed with all 
> kinds of heuristics with which to flag questionable constructs. I don't 
> think they should be part of the compiler, however.

Something like lint can be run and have a consistent output on every D 
compiler and platform since it doesn't care about building the actual 
platform specific code.  Having no warnings in the compiler means you 
can't have hardware/platform specific warnings.  And I think thats great.

Personally in C++ I like to turn to warning level 4 with warnings as 
errors and run both a GCC and a MSVC++ compile (when working on multiple 
platforms).  Most warnings can removed without use of pragma and using 
both compilers gives a much better coverage of warnings.

I'm personally a fan of catching things early.  The more warnings as 
errors the better.  If I have to suffer a little for false positives 
*shrug* however its much better then spending hours in a mud pit full of 
crocodiles; that is debugging.

-Joel