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by 1718627440 28 days ago
> That's just not true. Compilers do issue certain warnings by default and they even treat some warnings as errors.

Because some warnings are just believed to be more serious, than others.

> In fact, compilers recognize this issue by upgrading certain warnings to errors by default.

Which I interpret as a culture shift, due to people complaining about it and also because the contemporary meaning and expectation of warnings for programming languages has shifted.

1 comments

> Because some warnings are just believed to be more serious, than others.

Yes, that is my entire point. For some reason you were arguing against it.

I didn't intend to.

> Also, let's not forget that implicit casts between unrelated pointer types is only a warning in C.

I intended to argue against the "only a warning", because the meaning of a warning in C is something very serious. That is different from more modern languages, who may use this to inform you that you are no longer writing idiomatic code. Of course there are also exceptions, that you often need to enable explicitly. But the fact that something is a warning in C, doesn't mean it's nothing serious, quite the opposite. That's my point.

But you can't argue that a warning is less severe than a hard compiler error. Warnings can be supressed or ignored.

You were right to call out that the C standard only talks about diagnostics and the actual implementation is left to the compilers, but I don't think it really changes the actual argument I've been trying to make, namely that - unlike in C++ - implicit incompatible pointer casts are not a guaranteed compiler error.

In don't think this is required in C++ either.