Re: [Boost-users] local variable shadow

From: Chris Saunders (ctsa_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-02-19 14:10:35

Thanks for getting back to me on this. I'm referring to warnings from gcc 
(-Wshadow), so it's not exactly platform specific, and I understand that 
there are many cases where you may want to shadow names... I'm referring 
to fairly straightforward cases such as for the pool allocator patch I 
proposed:

http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2007/02/116693.php

I was mainly writing to try and find out if I was going through the right 
channels for this sort of thing, as I didn't get any feedback from 
boost_at_list.

I can see you understand where I'm coming from:

> ...also see the appeal of making innocuos changes to make a
> clean compile (so real errors are highlighted)

so I can easily accept your argument against these kind of changes -- I'll 
let this go except to register my vote as a boost user in favor of such 
changes. -Chris

On Mon, 19 Feb 2007, Robert Ramey wrote:

> Once one starts adding patches to suppress warnings, you come upon the fact
> that compilers have different sets of warnings.   And some warnings come
> with templated code.  If one "patches" this, he can end up with and
> #ifdef/#endif mess.  Worst of all, this is not apparent to the person who
> does the patching as he is concerned with one specific compiler so then the
> next person has to clean things up.  Finally, In some cases there is a case
> to be made for shadow names.  That is sometimes there is a global concept to
> be overloaded locally and this idea is expressed with name shadowing.
> Without doing this, one ends up with more names to keep track of in his
> head.
>
> And then there are warnings that a compiler emits which are totally bogus
> for the circumstance at hand.  In one case of the serialization library I
> had to apply such a patch just because it was easier than explaining time
> and again why this warning was bogus for the particular case - its a warning
> not an error for a reason.  This was just so people could get a "clean
> compile"  That is a compile certified as "clean".
>
> So, though I see the appeal of the idea of applying patches to suppress
> warnings and I also see the appeal of making innocuos changes to make a
> clean compile (so real errors are highlighted), I'm not totally convinced
> its a good idea for code which is to be compiled on wildly varying platforms
> and abi environments.  I believe that the work in propogating this to all
> the build environments is underestimated.
>
> Robert Ramey
>
> Chris Saunders wrote:
>> I find local variable shadow warnings helpful, but when I include
>> various boost libraries, I have to remove a lot of shadowing within
>> the boost functions themselves. Note that I'm not refering to name
>> conflicts with my own code.
>>
>> How can I submit patches to remove these type of warnings?
>>
>> Thanks, -Chris
>
>
>
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