Thread: Seg fault

I also think your professor may have exaggerated the rule a little bit. Allowing "no numbers" in the source is just silly.

Obviously, there are many different places where a constant in numeric form is more useful to the reader than a named constant. This should be the goal for all programming: Make the code readable. Typical constants that are easier to read as numbers than named constants are zero, one and minus one.

And as discussed, naming a constant TWO, or ZERO adds no benefit over writing 2 or 0 in the code - it just makes the reader wonder why the constant TWO is defined as 2 and if it's meaningful or not to change it.

If you can't meaningfully name your constant, then it's no point in giving it a name at all.

--
Mats

I'm guessing the file is getting opened, but you have a bug in the code. The reason "hello" isn't printed is because the output is buffered, so either add a newline to the printf(), or fflush(stdout).

Code:

printf("hello\n");

Originally Posted by Fox101

We are not allowed to use hard coded numbers. Our prof wants every number to be defined in the constants file.

It is silly to have a name the speaks exactly the same as the number

Defines should make code more readable - not opposite.

if you want to replace
return 0;

do not use
return ZERO;

make define like
#define SUCCESS 0

and use
return SUCCESS;

if your indexes have special meaning - give the names to the indexes that show this meaning like

#define TYPE 0
#define CODE 1
#define VALUE 2

and in your switch use
switch(line[TYPE])

or something like this

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

#define TWOI 2
#define CLASS_SIZE 20
#define NAME_SIZE 20
#define ONEI 1
#define SALARY_SIZE 2
#define TEXT_BUFFER 81
#define ZEROI 0

struct employee
{
  char *firstName;
  char *lastName;
  int id;
  char *class;
  double salary[SALARY_SIZE];
  struct employee *nextEmployee;
};

void hire(FILE **, char [], struct employee **);
void printList(struct employee *);

It's difficult to say why it crashes because you haven't shown any code, but the above seems suspect and may be reason due to the crashing. Are you using malloc on firstName, lastName, etc, before trying to read or copy anything into them?