Missing compiler warning?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, October 21, 2013 10:37:57 Chris wrote:
> Usually same-name
> variables are only used in the constructor. Using them in other
> places in the class is not recommendable

Well, that's up to the programmer, and plenty of folks use them in places like 
setters as well.

> but is it a good solution to categorically rule out warnings?

Honestly? Yes, I think that it is. I am of the opinion that the _only_ 
warnings that the compiler should have are things that will become errors 
later but aren't immediately in order to give programmers the chance to change 
their code before it breaks. For instance, override is now required on virtual 
functions which override a base class function, whereas before it wasn't - we 
used a warning to ease the transition, and that makes sense. But ultimately, 
it became an error.

Because it is not good practice to ever leave warnings in your code, I am 
firmly of the belief that something should be an error or completely legal and 
nothing in between. Otherwise, you're needlessly forced to change your code 
just because it _might_ have a problem.

Additional lint-like tools can be written and used to check for anything which 
"might" be wrong, and the compiler can be left to report only stuff that is 
definitively wrong. And once we have a D lexer and parser in Phobos (and we're 
getting close to having a lexer), writing such tools will become much easier, 
and then such tools can warn programmers about what _they_ want to be warned 
about but which isn't necessarily wrong.

- Jonathan M Davisbut is