5 Jan
2017
5 Jan
'17
7:39 a.m.
On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 08:30:48PM -0500, Nemo wrote:
On 4 January 2017 at 13:51, Steve Johnson
<scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote (in part):
That would be cool to know. Another thing I wish they had put in was
the ability to print the type (underlying type, not the typedef) names.
My first job was porting /usr/src/cmd to the ETA-10 which had bit pointers.
Yup, hardware pointers pointed at bits, not bytes. The C compiler people
had to decide what to do if you took an int and cast it into a C pointer.
They choose to shift it from bit to byte. So an int could countain an
address but it countained a bit address. Consider this code:
foo(size)
{
char *p = (char*)malloc(size); /* little white lie? uh-uh. */
....
}
If there is no #include <malloc.h> then the compiler thought that malloc
returned an int. The conversion caused a 3 bit shift when it shouldn't.
I wacked lint to print out the type names and any time I saw a ptr/int
type mismatch I just #included all the header files like malloc.h et al.
Turned a 6 month job into a 2 week job.
I believe at some point System V made the same changes. I'm sort of sure
that I sent my diffs to Dennis, not positive. They may have come up with
the same idea on their own.
Lint is a great tool.
These rules provided rich fodder for Lint, when
it came along, [...]
All this lint talk caused me to reread your Lint article but no
history there. Was there a specific incident that begat lint?