Re: C++ warnings vs. errors

["Manuel López-Ibáñez" <lopezibanez at gmail dot com>]

2008/6/13 Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com>:
> Jonathan Wakely wrote:
>>
>> Hi Volker, thanks for picking these issues up. I told Manuel I'd
>> review the rest of the remaining pedwarns, but haven't had time to do
>> it either.
>
> Just to chime in here: Volker, I agree with your comments.
>
> Jonathan, Manuel, if you would please make the time to finish this project,
> that would be very much appreciated.  We don't want this to be a case where
> we improved the infrastructure of the compiler -- but made the user
> experience worse.

Mark, I also agree with Volker comments. But I am respectfully not
going to tackle this.

First, because I have very little free time and I have many other
things half-backed that I would like to finish. And second and more
importantly, to "finish the project" as you say, just involves to
"grep -n -e "pedwarn" cp/*.c and s/pedwarn/permerror/ whatever you
think must be an error by default.

The only "difficulty" of this process is to know whether something
must be a warning or an error by default and I don't have the
knowledge to decide this. And, honestly, the idea of discovering it by
trial and error is not very exciting.  That may take a long time and a
lot of iterations. This job would be done better and faster by someone
knowledgeable in the C++ standard, who could also add a comment in
each warning/error stating why it is given.

(In fact, you don't even need to bootstrap and run the regression
testsuite: I bet there won't be any testsuite errors since the C++
testsuite can't distinguish between warnings and errors unless you
included "warning: " or "error: " in the dg-* statement. And those we
fixed already when we submitted the patch. Of course, bonus points
would be to add those tests for each permerror so we don't regress in
the future.)

I am deeply sorry if I dissapoint you. But I think it is better to be
honest than to silently ignore this issue.

Manuel.