Usage of "attribute"

[Dr. Torsten Rupp]

Dear Classpath-members,

after my last update of the Classpath sources I detected some parameters 
of functions which are unused and are marked by

__attribute__ ((__unused__)

Unfortunatelly this is not portable to some non-GNU compilers (as I 
know... at least I have one C-compiler for ARM which can not handle 
this). Can we use a macro for this? E. g.

#ifdef __GNUC__
  #define VARIABLE_ATTRIBUTE_UNUSED __attribute__ ((__unused__))
#else
  #define VARIABLE_ATTRIBUTE_UNUSED
#endif

A configure-test would also be possible instead "#ifdef __GNUC__".


Another idea would be some construct of the form

if ((parameter)==(parameter));

for each unused parameter. This would avoid a C-compiler warning for 
still not implemented functions and keep the prototypes clean 
(implemenation later will become simpler, because the header files do 
not change).

By,

Torsten