6 char externs and the ANSI standard

[Doug Gwyn <gwyn>]

> Who actually uses lint?  ...
> 
> I am actually curious how useful it is.  ...

I have made a practice of writing C code that passes entirely
unscathed through "lint" (SVR2 version) and find that it helps
tremendously when I have accidentally omitted an & from a struct
paramater to a function or some other hard-to-find mistake.
Often when someone brings me buggy code to help with, "lint"
shows their problem.  This is quite apart from its use in making
one's code portable.

The only thing I have not been able to keep "lint" happy about
is the use of a pointer returned by malloc() for some non-(char *)
datum.  This problem should go away with the advent of (void *).