phipps@fortune.UUCP (Clay Phipps) (03/20/84)
A facility to allow the programmer to declare the types of arguments
to external functions could be a big win for reliability
and speed of debugging, as experience with Pascal has indicated.
Supposedly, the C standards committee is working on such a feature.
I recommend that an explicit "unknown" or "arbitrary" argument
type name be provided for programming functions such as "printf".
The difference between this approach and the current state of affairs
is that the programmer could indicate (without depending on a comment :-)
that code *really* must be able to accept arguments of an arbitrary type.
This information could then be processed by a compiler or other tool,
and would be very helpful in 'maintain & enhance' programming efforts;
this would eliminate the present custom of making a possibly incorrect
deduction about an argument's data type from the absence of a declaration.
However, there is a huge amount of existing code
that should not have to be changed to satisfy a relatively late-arriving
standard. The proposed argument type declarations should be optional,
although all compilers should have a flag to enforce their use.
-- Clay Phipps
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