Re: [Plplot-devel] Another (windows) compiler support

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On 2006-10-10 09:33+0200 Arjen Markus wrote:

> Werner Smekal wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>>> The C compiler complained about a number of errors in our source
>>> files that
>>> other compilers did not notice or gave warnings about. I did not have
>>> time
>>> yet to look into them, but I think it is worth checking these.
>>
>>
>> Visual C++ 2005 gives also tons of warnings, especially about the use
>> of sprintf (instead of snprintf), deprecated features (according to
>> the C99 standard) and unused variables. Question is, if we should
>> change the code accordingly - I would highly suggest it and would also
>> do some work on it - or are there some opinions against such changes?
>
> Well, warnings I have seen from Visual C/C++ 6.0 (the ancient one) are
> mostly
> about longs being implicitly converted to ints and the like. Adding
> explicit casts
> may silence the compiler, but the code is not going to work better and
> certainly
> is not going to be more readable - in my opinion. I think we will need
> to be
> careful here. I vote yes to these issues:
> - remove unused variables (makes the code less confusing)
> - check the use of sprintf() (makes the code safer)
> - functions that do not return a value but should (makes the code safer too)
>
> I do not know enough about C99 to comment on deprecated features, but
> I would not like to see explicit casts all over the place.

Werner, I think Arjen's suggestions are good ones about limiting the kind of
changes you do.  Also, to make sure you are not introducing any new issues,
I suggest you start conservatively with a few sample changes, and let me
test them on Linux/gcc before you apply those same kind of changes to all
source files.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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