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Comment by astura | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, exactly. This error shouldn't ever happen, period. All modern development tools give big fat warnings when you do this.

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“Should” is a bad word. If you are basing a conclusion off of a “should,” you are skating on thin ice.

This is just one of the many reasons why I like Python.

    > if a = 3:
           ^
    SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Rust has an interesting take on that, it's not a syntax error to write "if a = 1 { ... }" but it'll fail to compile because the expression "a = true" returns nothing while "if" expects a boolean so it generates a type check error.

Of course a consequence of that is that you can't chained affectations (a = b = c) but it's probably a good compromise.

Well in Rust ypu couldn't have = return the new value in general anyway, because it's been moved. So even if chained assignment did work, it'd only work for copy types, and really, a feature that only saves half a dozen characters, on a fraction of the assignments you do, that can only be used a fraction of the time, doesn't seem worth it at all.

People (atleast me) ignore warnings quite often, they aren’t safe haven if you ask me.

Hey no problem, just add -Werror to your compiler flags (C/C++/Java) or '<TreatWarningsAsErrors>true</TreatWarningsAsErrors>' to your csproj (C#).

This! Treat every warning as a failure, ideally in your CI system so people can't forget, and this problem (ignoring warnings..) goes away.

You will have a better, more reliable, and safer codebase once you clean up the legacy mess and turn this on..

I agree. Having worked in a project with warnings as errors on (c++) I found it annoying at first but it made me a better coder in the long run.

Plus you get out of the habit of not reading output from the compiler because there are so many warnings...

Unless you follow a zero warning policy they are almost useless. If you have a warning that should be ignored add a pragma disable to that file. Or disable that type of warning if it's too spammy for your project.

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