CompuServe Messages

Yes, it is amazing how many bugs prototyping can help find. In fact, prototyping has done alot to improve my own code quite a bit. However, for every bug found by function prototyping, 10 more will still be in your code. Function prototyping does nothing for finding uninitialized pointers, array overwrites, or a host of other problems. And what about problems in the actual algorithm being used? In all these cases, a debugger is by far the best way to pinpoint the problem (in combination with other methods of course). Seriously think about how much prototyping speeds up your development time, and how much a debugger speeds up your development time. I think you'll find that the debugger ends up doing alot more work, and helps the programmer more, than the prototypes do. I'm in no way downgrading the importance of function prototypes, I'm only saying that they only catch one limited class of bugs.