[Lazarus] Hints usability (was: Re: Large program size - 1.8 MB for empty GUI project)

Christian Iversen chrivers at iversen-net.dk
Thu Apr 9 19:13:06 CEST 2009


Alexander Klenin wrote:
 > [...]
> 2) The compiler produces _many_ extraneous hints, which is very harmful --
>   it is impossible to produce hints-free code, so new hints has much
 >   more chances to go unnoticed.

While I agree in principle that extra verbosity is a source of bugs, the 
"hint" severity is for messages that cannot positively be determined to 
be potentially dangerous.

It goes like this:

Fatal error: Something so bad that compilation cannot possibly continue

Error: Something that is certainly wrong, but compilation can continue, 
even though it wont overall succeeed.

Warning: Something that is definitely /possibly/ dangerous, but might be 
safe in the specific circumstance. It's always possible to quench 
warnings by changing the code. Warnings should always be a sign of some 
problem in your code (that may or may not make your program behave 
incorrectly)

Hint: Something that can't be ruled out as dangerous, but might just be. 
For practical reasons, this category can't be merged with "warnings", 
because that would then produce so many warnings that the only useful 
error category would be "error". That would be bad.

-- 
Med venlig hilsen
Christian Iversen



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