machine generated code and chatty compilers

[Henry Spencer]

In article <1990Jan11.095715.17262 at gdt.bath.ac.uk> exspes at gdr.bath.ac.uk (P E Smee) writes:
>This gets to be a religious argument about the proper task for compilers.
>...
>My rationale is that the job of a compiler is to take a program source
>as input, and to check it *against the language spec*...

It is indeed somewhat of a religious argument.  However, some of us are
not supremely confident of our ability to get everything right (a mere
15 years of C programming experience not being sufficient for that) and 
appreciate any and all help the compiler can supply.  There needs to be
a "shut up, already" switch for dealing with code generated by programs,
or by people who never make mistakes (I've never met one, and I'm afraid
I don't believe you are one, but perhaps I am wrong), but most programs
are written by eminently fallible humans, and a suspicious compiler can
find many errors that would otherwise require extensive debugging.  And
people being what they are, more of those errors will be caught if deep
suspicion is the default than if you have to ask for it explicitly.
-- 
1972: Saturn V #15 flight-ready|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1990: birds nesting in engines | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu