gas warning fixes 8

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Dec 13, 2002, Andrew Cagney <ac131313@redhat.com> wrote:

>>> Did you know that GCC can selectively enable unused warnings and
>>> hence not enable the useless --Wunused-param option?  No need for
>>> all the attribute unused sillyness.
>> How would gcc tell the difference between an intentionally unused
>> parameter, and an accidentally unused parameter?

> It doesn't.  But then, GCC doesn't report an intentionally unused
> parameter that is being used either.

But that's on purpose.  Consider an argument that is only used inside
a preprocessor conditionals.  If it weren't lax about the unused
attribute, you'd have to arrange for the unused attribute to be
conditionally-compiled with a composition of the conditions under
which the variable might be unused.  This can get ugly fast.

That said, perhaps we should have a variant of the unused attribute
that asks gcc to warn if it turns out to be used.  There are times
when this is actually what one would want from it.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                 aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer