Opportunity

[Zach the Mystic]

On Tuesday, 9 April 2013 at 18:22:33 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> Is there any work on that?
>
> 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.

I personally think that there might be some benefit to an 
official discussion about lint-like tools. The schedule for the 
Conference has a lecture about AnalyzeD, which is the only 
official lint-like tool I've heard of so far. That is either 
meant to remain a third-party operation, or it is meant to at 
some point come closer to being an "official" lint-like tool.

I understand that D tries to clearly separate errors from legal 
code. But I'm sure lint-like tools have their place. It seems a 
little weird that there is nothing standard (that I've found, at 
least) about that topic. D has many standard things, unittest, 
ddoc, assert, etc., but no standard lint-like tools. My 
understanding of lint-like tools is that they address the areas a 
compiler shouldn't address, namely those which can generate false 
positives. But just because it could generate a false positive 
doesn't mean that it should be completely ignored.

Is there a way standardize a set of warnings such that some 
lint-like tool could be "compliant" with the standard warnings? A 
standard might help people focus on this issue better.