[vtk-developers] new warnings: explicitly assigning a variable to itself

[Brad King]

On 1/18/2011 10:24 AM, Jim Miller wrote:
> It was probably done years ago as a means to *prevent* warnings in the
> generated code.  I recall a path through the code where the variable
> would not be referenced.  So we would through in a foo=foo; line to
> quiet the compilers.  Now it seems like there is a warning that tells
> you when this is done :)

Thanks.

Yeah, modern optimizing compilers can even detect when the result
of an assignment is not used.  A nice way to reference (possibly)
unused variables to avoid warnings is

  (void)foo;

in C or alternatively

  static_cast<void>(foo);

in C++.  Since the code is generated then perhaps some of these
variables wont' be used.  I think changing

  error = 0; error = error;

to

  error = 0; (void)error;

will take care of these.

-Brad