Compiler Warnings

This Daily WTF reminded me of a less than glorious episode from my programming past. At a company that shall remain namless (and doesn't exist anymore) I was working on a C++ library to form part of a much larger application.

One fine day a colleague came stomping (that's the only verb that suits) over to my desk and boldly announced that "your code has crashed my compiler".  Somewhat alarmed at this I scurried (yes, scurried) back to his desk. "Look" he said, and did a little cvs/make dance. Lo and behold, when the compiler got to my code indeed it fell to silently chugging away. "See," he resumed, "it's crashed." 

"No," I said, "it's just compiling." 

"So where," he asked, "are the messages?"

"What messages?" I replied. He scrolled the xterm up a bit.

"These. All the warnings and stuff"

"Doesn't generate any," I said.

He boggled. "What, have you found some way of turning them off?"

"No," I said, "I just wrote the code so that it doesn't generate any warnings."

He boggled some more. "Why," he eventually managed to gasp, "would you bother doing that?"

I didn't last long there. It was best for all concerend, really.

1 comment:

Rob Brown said...

When I was a student, another more senior student advised me: "Compiler warnings? Don't worry about warnings - if they were something to really be concerned about the compiler would tell you they were errors!". It took me another 3 years to find out why my C and C++ programs were core dumping - only after I finished my degree! Lesson learned - if something is not right, then find out for yourself how to make it right!