Opportunity

[Walter Bright]

On 4/9/2013 11:22 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> No. As I understand it, Walter is against adding flags like that to dmd. He
> doesn't want a lot of stray flags which affect what is and isn't a warning and
> the like. He doesn't even like the fact that warnings exist in the first place
> - which I'm inclined to agree with. If it's something that has to be fixed, it
> should be an error, and if it doesn't have to be fix, don't warn about it,
> because any good programmer is going to have to fix all of the warnings anyway,
> ultimately making it not much different from an error anyway. Stuff like you're
> suggesting really should be left up to lint-like tools.

Yes, that's an accurate assessment of my opinion on the matter. Warnings are a 
sign that one has made a mistake in the language design. That's perfectly 
acceptable in, say, C, where there are many known mistakes but the C Standards 
committee finds it impractical to fix. Hence, warnings become the most 
reasonable avenue to improve the language.

In D we have the opportunity to fix. Warnings in D are often proposed when 
reasonable people do not agree on what the correct behavior of the language 
should be, but I regard such compromises as a copout.

Another bad problem with warnings (and we also have this issue with deprecation 
errors) is an increasing amount of D code relies on asking the question "does 
this expression compile without errors". A lot of sand gets thrown in those 
gears with compiler switches that turn language features on and off.