Wouter van Ooijen <wouter <at> voti.nl> writes:

> 
> > The only reason to have strong types is when one is very tight on space
 and/or
> > time and wants total control on data size, stack depth etc. In all other
 cases
> > ths is not needed. 
> 
> The main reason for (strict) type checking is to catch errors as early 
> as possible: better caught during compilation that during testing.
> 
> Loosely typed languages do have some use. I am a big an of Python, but I 
> often wished it had some form of type checking, especially on parameters.

Compiler errors are not a replacement for linting. Use a linter and a
highlighting source editor (I assume you already do that).

As anyone who wrote a program longer than 1000 lines knows, programming is
mostly about keeping the number of errors small enough to be fixable at any
given stage of the programming process. You said some time ago that you do not
like C because it is not very helpful to point out where you made a mistake in
its /compiler/ error messages. Using a highlighting editor will likely help you
put the correct number of braces and brackets in and that will help a proper
linter to point out the errors before you run the compiler.

I am not aware of any of the larger compiler ide packages having a built in
linter. Wrong ? (none of Borland C++ Builder, Eclipse, kdevelop or Sun 
netbeans/mobility have one). Please correct me if I am wrong.

I have used lclint and splint (see also clint) before, with good success. It
tends to point out a lot if interesting things. That and the C profiling book
from O'Reilly (High Performance Computing) will go a long way towards a good
start at writing reasonably good portable C. There is also weblint and tidyhtml
for web pages (those asp people should be made to use it all the time ...).

I once wanted to extend lclint with embedded C extensions but it is too much of
a hassle. I just #declare'd the relevant keywords as voids in the linted source.

Peter


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