Annotations??

[cpjust]

Hi,
I've never heard of these until Eclipse Automatically inserted a @SuppressWarnings annotation for me...

Now, that particular annotation I can understand -- it's just like #pragma warning(...) in Visual C++, but there's a lot more that I don't really understand what the benefits are. An example is @Override

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/Override.html

Doesn't the Java compiler automatically know if a certain method is an override from a base class? Is this just for human documentation, or is there a programatic value to using it?