Type safety could prevent nuclear war

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 4 February 2016 at 23:21:54 UTC, tsbockman wrote:
> Definitely. What puzzles me about the winning entry, though, is 
> that the compiler and/or linker should be able to trivially 
> detect the type mismatch *after* the preprocessor pass(es) are 
> already done.

Linkers don't know anything about types. A type is a language 
feature.

> It should just see that the post-preprocessor signatures of 
> `spectral_contrast()` in match.c and spectral_contrast.c are in 
> conflict, and either issue a warning, or refuse to link them at 
> all.

Has nothing to do with the preprocessor.

He defined float_t to be an alias for double in one compilation 
unit, and float_t to be an alias for float in another compilation 
unit.

In C, compilation units are completely independent, and can in 
fact come from different compilers and different languages. C is 
very much a system level programming language.