On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 3:55 AM, Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote:
Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 20, 2010, at 9:09 PM, Emil Dotchevski <emil@revergestudios.com> wrote:
One option is to "fix" them anyway. Unfortunately, a lot of times this involves casting, and in general I find it ill-advised to use a cast to suppress a warning. Think about it: casts are used to tell the compiler to do something it wouldn't normally do because it is dangerous. This is true for all casts, including the ones people sprinkle around to "fix" warnings.
True, but you can often avoid those casts by allowing (presumably safer) implicit conversions to do the same work,e.g. instead of static_cast<Base&>(derived), declare and initialize a named Base&.
Yes, often is correct. :) The question is what to do with the other instances, when you do need a cast or some other unwanted change in the program. By unwanted, I mean a change you're making not because it improves your code, but because it silences a particular warning on a particular platform. Even if the code looks weird, most people just add a comment that this weird thing they did is actually good, it "fixes" a warning. It would be interesting to know how many real problems are caused by this and how much time is wasted chasing such warnings. It may turn out that the potential danger many warnings protect against is negligible in comparison. Emil Dotchevski Reverge Studios, Inc. http://www.revergestudios.com/reblog/index.php?n=ReCode