With apologies to Winnie the Pooh, something I've really come to appreciate working with other people's code is code that compiles warning-free.

When you compile code with warnings you have to ask - are the warnings there because you've done something wrong? There's no way for you really to know. You need to look at the code, figure out what it is doing, and decide if it is correct. That's not always easy. But it always takes time.

Multiply a couple minutes of investigation by several hundred warnings, and new code can be a real pain to integrate. Not to mention that every time you integrate a new version, you have to look at the same warnings all over again or, if you've fixed the warnings, you have to integrate those fixes into the updated codebase.

So if you're making code for others, take the time to get rid of the warnings. When a new one comes along, it will be easy to spot and it'll most likely be in code you just wrote so it will be easy to fix. You might even consider turning on the compiler setting to treat warnings as errors.

One last thing, no points for using #pragma or compiler settings to suppress warnings. There are very rare occasions where the code is right and the compiler is wrong, but hardly ever.

From the programmers' wisdom file.