questions from using lint

[gelfand at valid.UUCP]

> In article <7097 at cca.UUCP> dewitt at cca.UUCP (Mark DeWitt) writes:
> >After three years of C programming I'm just starting to use lint, so
> >please no negative reinforcement by flaming about how stupid my questions
> >are, lest I give up on it entirely :-).
> 
> Mark, I'm not flaming you, but I *am* worried!  If you've been programming
> in C for 3 years and not using lint then EITHER 1) Your system doesn't *have*
> lint.  You have my profound sympathy. OR 2) Nobody ever taught you about
> using lint.  I wonder why not? OR 3) You never realised that using lint
> was important.  You must have wasted many hours (that you could have spent
> playing Rogue or whatever :-)) chasing problems down that lint might well
> have indicated to you.
> 
> People, what are *we* doing wrong when somebody can spend 3 years programming
> in a particular language and only then start using one of the most important
> development tools for it?
> 
> 							Kay.
> -- 
> "I AM; YOU ARE; HELLO: all else is poetry"
> 			... mcvax!ukc!warwick!kay

I have been programming for many years (over 20) in many different 
languages, and C is the only language that I can remember that
has a separate program (lint) to find and report compiler errors in 
source code. All of the other languages I have used have this function
built into the compiler. Perhaps because UNIX is a programmers
system rather than a production system this was felt to be unnecessary.
In most production systems the programs spend more time executing than 
compiling; while in a development system most of the time is spent editing 
and compiling. Thus running lint each time would add to the load
on the system.
A suggestion, system adminstrators could replace the cc command
with a script that would invoke lint before the C compiler. Then 
everyone would run lint and perhaps development time spent tracking
down bugs would decrease.

Brooks Gelfand