In my continuing adventures with legacy code I've inherited a code base that initially had over 500 compiler warnings. Now many of these warnings were pretty straightforward to fix but some of them are proving a little more interesting. My current personal favourite is CS0252.
I've got around half a dozen places where it's really unclear as to exactly what the original programmer was intending to do. Was he/she really meaning to do a reference comparison? Unlikely. So now I've got an interesting predicament. Do I change the code to remove the warning or do I leave the code as is and accept that as it's a legacy system the code must work fine. Safety (and sadly professionalism) must win and in these situations I must leave the code as is until I get round to covering the relevant code with tests. However it's like a real stone in my shoe and I've got to ask: wouldn't it have been so much nicer if the original programmer simply looked at the warning and thought, "I don't think that's quite right...."?
So the moral of the story is please pay attention to your compiler warnings. They'll help you identify potential bugs in your code and they might even help write code that's easier to understand and consequently more maintainable.
 |
 |
