Is it a good idea to eliminate compiler warnings?

Question

In the past I\'ve worked with -Wall and other switches for gcc to eliminate every compiler warning for projects I\'ve been involved in. Similarly, in Perl, I always program wit

Answer 1

Yes, do so..

Just yesterday I did that for a project at work. While removing the warnings I came about two issues that turned out to be real bugs.

It was a C-project, and in one source the sqrt (square root) was called. I got the following warning:

test.c:4: warning: implicit declaration of function 'sqrt'

Turned out that the coder forgot to include the correct header-file and the square root was called with integer arguments, not floats. This was obviously wrong and not what he intended.

The warning has been there for quite a while, but noone has seen it because it was lost in the other 1000 harmless warnings that just scrolled over the screen. Warnings are there for a reason.

Btw - fixing the warnings took me like ... 4 hours ... That's nothing compared to the time it took to write all that stuff.