Compiler warnings are your friend!

[Sir Fredrick]

Yes, it's true.
I spent several hours trying to help a co worker fix an odd problem with his program: it worked in debug mode, but not in release. After trying just about everything under the sun, I noticed that one of his functions of type bool was only returning a value under certain conditions...in fact, it never returned true, ever.

Of course the compiler knew what was wrong all along.
Warning: Not all control paths return a value.

I never looked at the warnings because I assumed he would have taken care of them. That'll teach me.

 

[Platypus]

Yes, that's why they're called warnings 🙂

 

[outoftheblue]

Heh... debugging is great fun...

What language were you using? I've yet to encounter a warning from javac.... last time it was bitching at me that a variable might not have been initialized (I initialized it inside an if)... but that was a fatal error and it wouldn't let me compile.

Isn't it my problem if I create a NullPointerException?? 😉

 

[Sir Fredrick]

Using C++...I always check the warnings when they're mine.

 

[Jzero]

<< Heh... debugging is great fun...

What language were you using? I've yet to encounter a warning from javac.... last time it was bitching at me that a variable might not have been initialized (I initialized it inside an if)... but that was a fatal error and it wouldn't let me compile.

Isn't it my problem if I create a NullPointerException?? 😉 >>



I get warnings from javac. It mostly happens when you use a deprecated API function.