“Soon after C was born without function prototyping, it was
agreed that code debugging was an excessively complex task. As a
result, a very powerful tool, lint, was created which was able to
make a large number of static verifications of the code. This
interesting program was written by S.C. Johnson in the early ’70s,
and it was the first static code-validation tool.”
“With the creation of the ANSI C standard, some lint
verifications became superfluous. However, lint continued to be
used while other tools were being created. John Guttag and Jim
Horning took a step forward by programming LCLint. In a rough
approximation, it works the same way as lint, and lint’s users will
need very little time to understand how to use it. However, with a
bit of work, we can improve the detail of analysis we received from
lint by using LCLint. Since its birth it has received the
financial support of ARPA, NSF and DEC ERP.”
“Today, the LClint source code is freely available. It was
written in C; therefore, anyone with a standard ANSI C compiler can
recompile it for their machine. Linux users can download it as a
tar archive file and as an RPM package. It is available in both
source and executable format. Some distributions, such as SuSE
Linux 5.3, currently provide it as part of the distribution. It can
be downloaded from http://linuxdoc.org/.”