A TRACE statement is meant for programmers to use as temporary debug statements while working in their code. Functionally, TRACE statements are treated EXACTLY as ERROR statements are: The TRACE statement expects one string literal parameter, the value of which will be printed upon execution, along with the precise location in the code where the TRACE statement was placed. However, in addition to this, the compiler also issues a WARNING for the presence of each TRACE statement. This is meant to help remind the programmer of the presence of these temporary statements so that they will not be forgotten in production code.