On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Roman Zippel wrote:
>
> Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> > I know people don't understand about the difference between signed and
> > unsigned compares, and people may not even realize that just by doing
> > the patches David ended up fixing a few real bugs that were uncovered
> > simply by virtue of having to think about what kind of comparison it was
> > supposed to be.
>
> What's wrong with "-Wsign-compare"? You just fixed only a minor amount
> of compares.
-Wsign-compare is TOTALLY useless.
The problem with signed compares is not just comparing a signed entity
against a unsigned one. It's quite common to have signed quantities on
both sides, but _intending_ a unsigned comparison or vice versa.
This is simply an area where it's better to make people think about the
types, than to magically try to do the "right" thing.
> What's wrong with this version?
[ Standard stupid min() removed ]
You just fixed the "re-use arguments" bug - which is a bug, but doesn't
address the fact that most of the min/max bugs are due to the programmer
_indending_ a unsigned compare because he didn't even think about the
type.
Linus
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Aug 31 2001 - 21:00:28 EST