Tabnanny really useful?

[Mike Meyer]

"Yet Another Mike" <saynotodevilspam at yahoo.com> writes:

> I'm told Tabnanny was inspired by lint, the Unix utiltity to check C sources 
> (and probably others).  Lint was primarily useful in days long ago when CPUs 
> were slow and a compile used a significant amount of resources. In a 
> multiuser environment (we ran an Intel 286 in multiuser mode!!), the 
> compiles could bring everyone else to a crawl. Lint was used because it was 
> a less-CPU intensive way to catch bonehead errors and fix them before using 
> precious compile time.

Originally, lint caught errors the C compiler didn't flag as
errors. For example:

int *main = { ..... } ;

The C compiler would build and link that just fine on v7. lint would
complain about it. Of course, if you used the right ints to fill the
array, it would produce a valid executable.

       <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.