6 char externs and the ANSI standard

[Guy Harris]

> Who actually uses lint?  Around here we never got used to using
> it because our only machines were two 11/23's and an 11/10 and it
> wouldn't fit.

Well, the 11/10 is a pain, considering it can't even run V6, much less
V7, but 2.9BSD on the 11/23 might run lint with overlaying (address-space-
map switching, not on-disk - the non-split-I&D 11s' major problem is with
virtual address space, not physical).

We use lint quite a bit here.  If you have a machine with 16-bit "int"s
and 32-bit pointers, you learn to do so.  Quickly.  It catches attempts
to pass an unadorned NULL or 0 to a routine that expects a (32-bit) pointer
instead of a (16-bit) int - and those will nail you to the wall.

> I am actually curious how useful it is.  I have written one program
> using lint regularly while writing it, and all the things lint found
> were somewhat silly.  So, I went to my other programs (written over
> the last few years) and ran lint on them....same result.  Do I just
> write good code or what?

Probably you just write good code.  There's tons of code out there that
"lint" would just toss its cookies on, from Bell, Berkeley, and other
places.  Somebody at Bell seems to be putting the pressure on to "lint",
as a lot of stuff in System V seems to have been changed to quiet "lint".
A lot of 4.2BSD stuff seems to have been "lint"ed also.

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy