C a strongly typed language?

[Robert Viduya]

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Posted from  g-frank at gumby.UUCP
> 
>    It looks like I've been wrong about a large class of C programmers.
> These folks LOVE strong typing.  They love it so much that they will
> put up with casting function call arguments because the language they
> are working in doesn't know enough about function types to do a proper
> NIL constant conversion.  They hold it in such esteem that they will
> put up with having to pass the entirety of their code through some extra
> program in addition to their compiler.  I mean, these folks are not only
> willing to declare their faith, they go out of their way to SUFFER for
> it.  I'm, like, awed.
> 

I wouldn't call lint an extra program in addition to the compiler.  I would
say it's a part of the compiler.  If you put lint and cc together you have
what most people consider a compiler.  All the other compilers I've worked
with (Pascal, Fortran, PL/I and others) do everything that lint and cc
put together do (especially Pascal).  Lint and cc merely seperated the tasks
performed by the compiler: that of program verification/checking and producing
code.  Granted, lint does do a bit more such as portability checking (although
there are some compilers that do check that) and also cc does has to do some
syntax checking.  As a personal opinion, my main gripe about all these C
compilers popping up all over the place for non-unix systems is that most
of them do not come with lint.

As for suffering through using lint, I'd say it wasn't suffering, but more
like a slight-but-necessary inconvenience.  The suffering part is when lint
isn't used.

					robert
-- 
Robert Viduya
Georgia Institute of Technology

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