Bonjour Alan,

> As I needed to parse some string representing time (of the form hh:mm), 
[...]

Welcome to the dates and time users' camp! Too bad that there is no
support for that kind of stuff in our favorite language :(

> So shouldn't there be a warning (or an error) when using a size field 
> with chars ?
> 
> Alan

We must be a bit more precise than that: we should check that the size
field is positive and lesser or equal than 1.

In effect:

- a 0 sized char scanf specification has a special useful meaning (see
Scanf.mli for details): it means ``pick'' the current character
without reading it (in order to test its value and decide what to do
next),

- a 1 sized char scanf specification seems to be harmless.

I will try to had a static check in the type-checker (the usual Caml
way), orelse a runtime failure in Scanf (the usual way of more
conventional programming languages).

Amicalement,

Pierre Weis

INRIA, Projet Cristal, Pierre.Weis@inria.fr, http://pauillac.inria.fr/~weis/


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