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Re: GCC warnings for unused global variables


On Thu, May 01, 2003 at 07:05:08AM -0400, Robert Dewar wrote:
> > And warning on perfectly legal, innocuous constructs makes
> > absolutely no sense to me.
> 
> Well all warnings apply to legal constructs, or they would be errors!

> As to innocuous, the reason why something is NOT an error is that you
> can't tell whether it is innocous or not, so warnings almost always
> generate some false positives (or they would not be warnings!)

Correct, but in this case, we've broken a 20-year-old convention.
"Broken", that is, because we've carefully designed -Wall so that
we can expect that high-quality software development processes can
produce their code with -Wall -Werror.
 
> In this case, it is not clear what you are suggesting, to remove all
> warnings in this situation would certainly remove some very useful
> warnings. 

The suggestion should be clear: we have, in effect, introduced a regression.
We should not be warning for unused constant strings, precisely because
the existence of such strings is part of the de-facto standard SCCS/RCS
coding convention.




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