Thread: New Student Error Messages

If you are serious, that means it is an error that was too severe for your program to recover from.

If you aren't serious, go away troll.

Are you getting these errors when you compile, or when you run your program?

I suspect they are compile errors. In that case, the compiler should report the line-number where the problem is... or near where the problem is... Often, the compiler doesn't know exactly where the problem is because it doesn't know what you were trying to do. The compiler can get confused... I've had the compiler report hundreds of errors because of one missing curly-brace!

So, the trick is to compile and test-run a few lines at a time. Start-out all of your programs as "Hello World" type programs, and add one or two lines, test-compile, test-run, add one or two more lines, etc. That way, you will always know where the problems are, and you will only have one or two problems/errors at a time.

But, don't think you can always write you code in line-number sequence... You can't call a function that doesn't exist yet, etc. But, you can write an empty function, and put-in little temporary cout statements like cout << "I'm in function1() now"; or cout << "X= " << X; so that you can see what your program is doing, and make sure it's working before it's completely done. As you get more experience, you will learn more ways of testing your partially completed code.

Compile-time errors are the easiest to find, because the compiler trys to tell you what it thinks is wrong.

Link errors are a little trickier, because you don't get line numbers. But, you usually get a variable name or a function name.

Run-time bugs are the toughest, because it's up to you to find the problem. Sometimes you can "comment-out" some lines to see if the problem goes-away, or add some of those extra cout statements to try and figure-out what's going-on. And, you can learn to use your compiler's debugger...