Thread: Common errors

Post your common errors on programming. Like the things you do wrong over and over again and spent hours and hours to find what is damn wrong with your program. Things that the compiler cannot catch.

After a few seconds of thinking I ll give credit for the most frustrating error to the X,Y confusion.
Like you want to do:

Code:

if (myStruct.x > endOfboardX || myStruct.x < startOfboardX)
   doThis();
els if ((myStruct.y > endOfboardY || myStruct.x < startOfboardY)
   doThat();

where obviously you copy paste the "y line". And I spent hours and hours trying to find out what is wrong. Grrrr damn the x,y coordination system

Here is a list of some common ones I know people make that I can think of off hand:

Examples:

Code:

/*
 * Troublesome conditions
 */
if (i = 0)
{
  // whatever
}

/*
 *  Sneaky semicolons
 */
for(i = 0; i < size; ++i);
{
  // Look, I think I am looping, but I am not.
}

/*
 * Forgetting to initialize
 */
int x;

printf("&#37;d", x);

/*
 * scanf() seems to be oh so misused.
 */
int x;

scanf("%d", x);

/*
 * String literals should always be constant
 */
char *s = "Hello world!";

[color=green]/*
 * Integer math woes
 */
int x = 35;
double y = x*2/3; // this doesn't produce what you are wanting.

There are more, but its a good starter list.

this was painful

Code:

#define MAXSIZE 20;

Code:

/* This error is often fun to deal with since unlike my previous ones, modern compilers may not
 * always be able to cope with this.
 *
int function(int x)
{
  return x * x;
}

While writing a constructor for a node - type object in a binary search tree I accidentally assigned the indices of the top and bottom wrong, that is, I pointed the top variable to the bottom and the bottom variable to the top. That took me about 8 hours of debugging to figure out, though to be fair I did find other bugs in the process. I hate it when you make a really simple mistake and you expect it to be a higher - level error, like in how your algorithm is set up; I spent a ton of time combing my tree constructor method.

Originally Posted by cpjust

But a lot of those errors should be reported by the compiler, unless you have a low warning level set.

Indeed a lot should be, however sometimes they aren't and those are the ones that destroy my sanity. Particularly when for some reason or another the IDE is not correctly pointing out the flawed area of code. Syntax highlighting is helpful but it is not always the miracle worker that you would think.