avl

[Mark Mallett]

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       As I recently pointed out to my intro CS class, automatic (implicit)
       declarations are DANGEROUS.  They make it VERY EASY to write buggy code,
       as anybody who has written much Fortran (God help them) will know. 

                                                     =Spencer


The Fortran language may be a bit of a pain (a bit! yes, I've written a
lot of it, God help me).  But it is kind of nice to use a compiler that
tells you a lot about what it thinks it is doing.  If I can remember back
to Fortran days; I recall that when opening the program listing (imagine
that, a compiler producing a listing?) (no sarcasm.  really.)  one of
the first things to do was to check to symbol table map.  Unused and
undefined variables were flagged in special ways.  If I had undeclared
variables which I hadn't meant to be undeclared, I could spot them
immediately.  And I must say I'm awfully tired of 

	int	i,j,k;			/* scratch */
	int	c,c1;			/* characters */

Which isn't to say I'm interested in FORTH-style i,j,k with their
magical (er, magic/l?) values.

Admittedly this is a tangential article.  Just reminiscing about
compiler output.

Mark Mallett
decvax!sii!mem