Subject: Re: bug#61730: 30.0.50; Compiler warnings for delq and delete

From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2023 23:15:56 -0500

> He mentioned only one: "when you know that the elements to be deleted
  > cannot include the first element", and that's the only one I know.  Are
  > there more?

  > Even that case is a burden to the reader and the maintainer, because one
  > has to think about and verify that this condition is fulfilled.

When someone wrote code like that, either person thought about the
question and determined the return value could be ignored, or person
made a mistake and introduced a bug.

How often does each of those two happen?
What fraction of these unused return values are real possible bugs?

People won't mind a rare spurious warning if the warning message
usually indicates a real problem.  But if it is the opposite way,
people will see the warning as annoying bureaucracy and resent it.

Can we come up with a conventional way to indicate you know
you're ignoring the return value and you've concluded it is safe?
For instance, using it as the arg of `ignore'?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)