# V672. It is possible that creating a new variable is unnecessary. One of the function's arguments has the same name and this argument is a reference.

The analyzer has detected a possible error: a variable is being declared whose name coincides with that of one of the arguments. If the argument is a reference, the whole situation is quite strange. The analyzer also imposes some other conditions to reduce the number of false positives, but there's no point describing them in the documentation.

To understand this type of errors better, have a look at the following sample:

    bool SkipFunctionBody(Body*& body, bool t)
    {
      body = 0;
      if (t)
      {
        Body *body = 0;
        if (!SkipFunctionBody(body, true))
          return false;
        body = new Body(body);
        return true;
      }
      return false;
    }

The function requires a temporary variable to handle the SkipFunctionBody () function. Because of inattention, the programmer once again declares a temporary variable 'body' inside the 'if' block. It means that this local variable will be modified inside the 'if' block instead of the 'body' argument. When leaving the function, the 'body' variable's value will be always NULL. The error might reveal itself further, somewhere else in the program, when null pointer dereferencing takes place. We need to create a local variable with a different name to fix the error. This is the fixed code:

    bool SkipFunctionBody(Body*& body, bool t)
    {
      body = 0;
      if (t)
      {
        Body *tmp_body = 0;
        if (!SkipFunctionBody(tmp_body, true))
          return false;
        body = new Body(tmp_body);
        return true;
      }
      return false;
    }

You can look at examples of errors detected by the V672 diagnostic.