[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
More information about the Lazarus
mailing list