Re: PATCH: Find more ObjC methods

[Ziemowit Laski]

On Monday, Oct 6, 2003, at 15:14 US/Pacific, Alexander Malmberg wrote:

> Ziemowit Laski wrote:
> > On Sunday, Oct 5, 2003, at 07:52 US/Pacific, Alexander Malmberg wrote:
> > > 2. Warning. Should the compiler warn when a method declared only in 
> > > an
> > > @implementation is used outside that @implementation?
> [snip]
> > > (2) is a convention, but a very useful convention, and it's used a 
> > > lot
> > > in eg. GNUstep.
> >
> > And what does this convention buy you?  You wind up warning about
> > methods
> > that are _always_ available!  :-)
>
> ?
>
> I'm not really sure if this statement is intended as a joke, as the
> smilie implies, or not. Do I need to explain why conventions, in
> addition to what the language enforces, and with help from the compiler
> in following them, are a good thing?

You do if your conventions rely on buggy compiler behavior.  In this 
case,
you are asking that the compiler ignore a method that is in plain sight
and pretend that it is not there.  What could possibly be the benefit of
this?

> [snip]
> > Perhaps in the future,
>
> Is there any good reason why it can't be done now?

If you can engineer a patch which, when say, '-Wprivate-methods' is 
specified,
generates an aptly-worded warning, I'd personally have no objections 
(even though
I still have absolutely no clue as to why this would be useful to 
anyone).

> > when we unify the the ..._INTERFACE_TYPE and
> > ..._IMPLEMENTATION_TYPE
> > data structures, we can also define a METHOD_HAS_PROTOTYPE() bit in
> > ..._METHOD_DECL, and you
> > guys could key off of that to generate the (newly-worded) warning?
> > This would have to be
> > enabled via a flag, since our resident NeXTies would almost certainly
> > _not_ want to see this
> > warning. :-(
>
> They see it now, so I don't think it'd kill them to keep seeing it. :)

To the extent that they are seeing it now, it is clearly a bug, since 
the
warning says 'foo may not respond to bar', even though foo absolutely,
positively responds to bar in this case.

--Zem
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Ziemowit Laski                 1 Infinite Loop, MS 301-2K
Mac OS X Compiler Group        Cupertino, CA USA  95014-2083
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