On Tue, 27 Jun 2006 13:28:39 +0100, Oliver Kullmann <O.Kullmann@swansea.ac.uk> wrote:
In my opinion, a major problem with paying attention to warnings and changing the code in order to prevent warnings is, that in this way the code is not only written for a *special compiler*, but even **for a special compiler version**. I don't think that this is good practice.
I sympathize will all the points you make. Furthermore many VC level 4 warnings are quite excessive: for instance I get warnings if I do something like static_cast<smaller_int_type>(larger_int_type_expr); with the intent of truncating a value. Of course the static_cast is there to prevent a warning but VC8 tells me there's a loss of information and I should mask the source value. Example: unsigned int n = ... static_cast<unsigned char>( x & UCHAR_MAX ); It also specifies that there will be no performance loss in optimized builds, but of course that could not hold for other compilers. And there's always the risk that another compiler will yield something like: "useless masking used at line xyz" :) Something could be done with a macro in this case but... is it really worth? BTW, "C++ Coding Standards" by Sutter/Alexandrescu also suggests the "wrapping source file" (aka header) approach (on the user part though, not by boost directly). --Gennaro.