Can someone look at my simple program and tell me what is wrong with it?

I'm in an Intro to Comp Science class and I'm writing a program in C++

Here is the question:

Workers at a particular company have won a 7.6% pay increase retroactive for six months. Write a program that takes an employee's previous annual salary as input, and outputs the amount of retroactive pay due the employee, the new annual salary, and the new monthly salary. Use a variable declaration with the modifier const to express the pay increase. Your program should allow the calculation to be repeated as often as the user wishes.

Here is my program:

Code:

---

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main( )
{
  const double PAY_INCREASE = 7.6;
  double original_salary, new_salary, pay_raise;

  cout << "Enter original salary:\n";
  cin >> original_salary;

  pay_raise = ((original_salary*PAY_INCREASE)/100)/2;
  new_salary = original_salary+pay_raise;

  cout << "Your new yearly salary is " << new_salary
        << " dollars for this year.\n";

  cout << "Would you like to input a new salary? (answer y or n)"

  if (x == y)
  {
        cout << "Enter original salary:\n";
        cin >> salary_problem;
  }
  else
  {    cout << "Good bye!\n";
  }
  return 0;
}

---

Basically I want to give the person their salary for the year and then have it ask them if they want to enter a new salary. The first part (getting the salary) is compiling and running, but I can't get it to repeat etc

Any help is VERY appreciated!!

Sooooooooo, put the whole thing in a loop?

How would I write that exactly? (sorry I'm new to C++)

You can wrap the part you want to repeat inside an infinite loop (either while (1) or for (;;)), and put a break statement at the point you want to jump out of the loop to end the program.

Could you maybe write out how to do that? (if that's too much to ask, I understand) but it would be a great help :-)

I thought it was pretty self-explanatory. Have you covered loops, and break and continue statements, yet? It would be possible to do it with a goto statement, but they're considered bad practice when used unnecessarily and you definitely don't need one here.

We touched on loops for a day - so hardly at all, we haven't done break and continue statements yet and we were told to stay away from goto statements haha

OK now I'm at this:

Code:

---

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main( )
{
  const double PAY_INCREASE = 7.6;
  double original_salary, new_salary, pay_raise;

  cout << "Enter original salary:\n";
  cin >> original_salary;

  while (new_salary > 0)
  {
  pay_raise = ((original_salary*PAY_INCREASE)/100)/2;
  new_salary = original_salary+pay_raise;


  cout << "Your new yearly salary is " << new_salary
        << " dollars for this year.\n";
  }

  return 0;
}

---

am I getting closer? What am i still doing wrong? It is compiling but not runningt

If a "break;" statement occurs in a loop, it immediately jumps out of the loop. If a "continue;" statement occurs in a loop, it immediately starts the next iteration of the loop (and if it's a for loop, the iteration statement is executed first, so the loop variable takes its next value). For example,

Code:

---

int i = 0;
while (1) {
  std::cout << i << '\n';
  ++i;
  if (i == 4) break;
}

---

prints

0
1
2
3

In your case, the part you want to repeat goes inside the while (1) loop, and at the point inside the loop where you want to exit the loop, you use the "break;" statement. When it jumps out of the loop, the program exits (assuming the return statement is the only thing after the loop).

You haven't initialized new_salary before first accessing it (in the while loop condition).

how to I access it in the while loop condition?

(i apologize again and thank you all so much for your help)

new_salary is an automatic variable, so its value is undefined before you assign it a value. The only place you do this is INSIDE the loop ("new_salary = original_salary+pay_raise;") but this happens AFTER the first time you try to read it ("while (new_salary > 0)") so the first time you try to read it, it's undefined. Also, your loop would never terminate, since new_salary is increasing, so if it starts out as > 0, it stays that way forever.

Edit: Actually, new_salary doesn't increase inside the loop, since the expression you're assigning to it (original_salary + pay_raise) never changes. So it stays constant. The result is the same - the loop never terminates.

so how would I get it to terminate?

Basically, what I want to know is, how do I get it to just keep asking the above question?

Your original code was closer to what you need. Basically, each time you input original_salary, you compute new_salary ONCE, then print it, ask whether to start over, and if the answer is no, do a break. All of the aforementioned code goes inside an infinite loop (either while or for).

Actually, I would use a do while loop here. Do while works like this:

Code:

---

do {
    //code that repeats goes here
} while(expression); //repeat until expression is false.
//put code for what to do after the loop here.

---

The reason for preferring do while to an infinite loop and a break is that it is more clear to see when the loop terminates.

I did it! Thank you so much everyone for your help!