== Quote from bearophile ([email protected])'s article > A small Reddit thread regarding if unused variables and imports are better as errors or warnings: > http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d3emo > In my opinion in this case errors are too much, warning are enough. > Few situations for those warnings: > - warning for unused variables (as GC, C# and other compilers do); > - warning when a variable get used in some ways, and then its last assignment gets unused (done by a kind of C compiler); > - unused imports (useful to keep code clean and remove unnecessary module dependences); > - unused functions (but this is harder to do in a clean way in a language that has templates, so this may be omitted). > Among those four warnings the most useful are the first two ones. In C once > the unused variable warning of GCC has found at compile time a bug in my code (I did forget to increment that variable in the loop). So I have loved this warning ever since. > Bye, > bearophile
If we make unused imports an error, how is anyone supposed to do import someSmallLibrary.all? If you make unused imports an error, the collective cost of extra import declaration boilerplate will probably be larger than the GDP of some African countries.
