questions from using lint

[Garry Wiegand]

In a recent article philip at axis.UUCP (Philip Peake) wrote:
>...
>It would seem that some people out there MODIFY lint to match their own
>compilers. This makes using lint just about worthless when trying to write
>portable code. The only consolation is that such a nasty trick seems to
>be quite rare.
>...

I have had the pleasure of having to dig through the source to Lint. At least
on the machine I was on (a BSD derivative), Lint just consisted of the front
end of the machine's regular C compiler, plus a lot of kludges to check a few
more things and to deal with Lint's intermediate data files. If Lint is
indeed always based on the host's compiler, one might expect considerable
variability.

garry wiegand
garry%cadif-oak at cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu

Interesting aside: the source to Lint could not in a million years pass Lint.