lint won't verify printf formatting against variable types??

[Karl Heuer]

In article <115 at borabora.omni.com> bob at omni.com (Bob Weissman) writes:
>I'm talking about
>	if (expression);
>which, while legal, *never* makes sense semantically

Well, some versions of |<assert.h>| do this deliberately.  (But these should
be fixed anyway, since the pANS requires |assert()| to be a void-valued
expression macro, and it's not hard to do this.)  And I have, myself, used a
null-bodied |if| with an |else| clause, in situations where this was clearer
than a straight |if| with the condition inverted.

It would be within the "spirit of lint" to warn about *all* null statements,
provided (a) any instance can be silenced with the lintpragma |/*NULL*/|, and
(b) the warning can be disabled by a command-line option.  (Probably |if| and
|while| should have separate flags, since many people depend on null-bodied
|while|.)

Why warn about null |while| at all?  Because it's *possible* that it's a typo,
just as with |if|; and those of use who never write it that way would be able
to make good use of the warning.  (Some of us always use |/*NULL*/|, or use
empty braces instead of a semicolon, or write |do; while (ex);| whenever the
entire loop is contained in the test.)

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl at haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint
________
Note: I'll be out of town July 2-22, so I probably won't be able to reply to
any followups.  If you send me mail, include enough context that I'll still
remember the thread three weeks later.