oz@nexus.YorkU.CA (Ozan Yigit) (01/02/91)
There has been some questions raised about the trustworthiness of indent, and it seems, at least to some of the users, that this utility is still not worth using. For all they know, under the full moon, while indenting the source code for some evil application (perl.c?), indent may decide that one-to-one source transformation for readability is not good enough. Wham. I, on the other hand, trust indent as much as I trust any C compiler I may need to use, provided the optimizer is off ;-). As someone who spent a great deal of time with indent, and have had some hand in getting it publicly distributed, I am concerned with the amount of distrust. I would, therefore, invite you to send me any or all bugs you can find in a recent version of indent, [such as the one that was posted to the net, or the latest berkeley version/SunOS 4.0 version] about any transformations that effect the semantics of the C code being indented. If such bugs still exist, I will do whatever is necessary to ensure that a version of indent *without* such bugs is available for public consumption. If no such bugs are found, than maybe we can put this issue to rest once for all. oz [Please respond with e-mail] --- I thank God for not making me a computer | internet: oz@nexus.yorku.ca scientist. -- Dan Bernstein | uucp: utai/utzoo!yunexus!oz
adrian@mti.mti.com (Adrian McCarthy) (01/10/91)
In article <19626@yunexus.YorkU.CA> oz@nexus.YorkU.CA (Ozan Yigit) writes: >I, on the other hand, trust indent as much as I trust any C compiler I may >need to use, provided the optimizer is off ;-). Somebody pointed out to me that if you're afraid of compiler bugs, your best bet is to leave the optimizer in the default mode, since that is the mode that has been tested more. For most compilers, this does mean leaving the optimizer off, but for some (like VAX/VMS compilers), leaving the optimizer on can be your better bet. [A well-tested optimizer may actually "fix" a problem created by the raw code generator. :-)] Aid. (adrian@gonzo.mti.com)