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Message: [QUOTE="David Brown, post: 5152243"] I missed that bit - sometimes threads in c.l.c. get so long that I have to skip many details. But you are right - that /is/ a good reason to have unnamed parameters in C. If you have to fit a function into a particular general function type, then you will sometimes be forced to have parameters that are never used, and typically have generic names like "param1" in the function type declaration - leaving them unnamed in the function definition would be clear documentation that they are never used in that particular function. So I'll make a minor U-turn and say that unnamed parameters in C /would/ sometimes be a useful feature. True, but without any standard way of handling this then "(void) x;" is the simplest and clearest way to have a statement with no effect. I think the idea is perhaps unusual - and it is certainly heretic in c.l.c. If you haven't done embedded development, then the idea of "disabling interrupts" is probably a bit odd. But let's take another example. Suppose you have some sort of lock, with two functions "getBigLock()" and "releaseBigLock()": extern void getBigLock(void); extern void releaseBigLock(void); // Don't call this unless you've got the big lock! extern void doSomethingDangerous(void); void foo(void) { getBigLock(); doSomethingDangerous(); releaseBigLock(); } void bar(void) { doSomethingDangerous(); } In this case, the compiler cannot help spot that bar() is going to cause trouble - you are reliant on comments and programmer care to get the locking right. In C++, you could do this: class BigLock { public: BigLock() { getBigLock(); } ~BigLock() { releaseBigLock(); } } extern void doSomethingDangerous(const BigLock&); void foo(void) { BigLock bl; doSomethingDangerous(bl); } void bar(void) { doSomethingDangerous(); } bar() is now clearly a compile-time error. doSomethingDangerous() doesn't actually do anything with the parameter - it just uses type-checking to ensure that you have a BigLock. With enough care, templates, and hierarchies, you can do quite a bit of compile-time checking using types like this. [/QUOTE]

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