Coding: Compilation and Linking

Warning messages are there for a reason. They warn us of code that may produce problems, primarily leaving wide openings for bugs to crawl in. Any unneeded warnings get in the way of noticing important ones. Therefore:

• All code should produce no warnings, when compiled with the highest level of warning generation available!

• The only common warning that may tolerably be globally disabled, as of this writing, is the one about the "single-line comment" extension. The "unused parameter" warning may be disabled function by function, and should only be disabled for callback functions that must have that parameter in the list because other functions called the same way use it.

Use of the STRICT keyword ("#define STRICT", at the top), is also strongly encouraged, though since it can cause problems if used in only some files of an executable, it should be used on all or none. So is running Dr. Watson set to report all parameter errors.

Makefiles should be set up in such a way that switching between debug and release versions can be done by changing one single variable, named something obvious like DEBUG.