OpenEuphoria

Re: request for change

• Posted by Matt Lewis <matthewwalkerlewis at ?ma?l.com> Jan 08, 2008
• 621 views

Bernie Ryan wrote:
> 
>    'without warning' is used by lazy programmers that don't
>    want to be bothered with cleaning up their programs by
>    removing unused variables.

Yes, that happens, but not always because the programmer is lazy.  There
are many times that unused variables can't be removed, like when they
are part of an event handler callback, and the processing doesn't need
to use all of the parameters.

Or it could be that the warning is about a possible short circuit in an
if statement, where that is exactly what the programmer wants.  There's
also the case of unused global constants that are part of a library,
and so might be used by clients (or not, but that's not a good reason to
eliminate them).  Of course, the better solution for that is to put
without warning at the bottom of the file.

In any case, your argument doesn't support changing the defaults.  It's
the equivalent of, "Some people abuse this, so let's just give up and
stop issuing warnings at all."  I think it's better to require affirmative 
action from the programmer to turn off the warnings.  If we had multiple
levels of warning, then we could debate about the proper default warning 
level, but since we only have one, I think it's obvious that the default 
should be to have warnings on.

Matt