Before we talk about our next subject, we’re going to sidebar into the topic of scientific notation. Scientific notation is a useful shorthand for writing lengthy numbers in a concise manner. And although scientific notation may seem foreign at first, understanding scientific notation will help you understand how floating point …
In the previous lesson (), we covered signed integers, which are a set of types that can hold positive and negative whole numbers, including 0. C++ also supports unsigned integers. are integers that can only hold non-negative whole numbers. To define an unsigned integer, we use the unsigned keyword. By …
Chapter Review A is an error that occurs when you write a statement that is not valid according to the grammar of the C++ language. The compiler will catch these. A occurs when a statement is syntactically valid, but does not do what the programmer intended. The process of finding …
When you make a semantic error, that error may or may not be immediately noticeable when you run your program. An issue may lurk undetected in your code for a long time before newly introduced code or changed circumstances cause it to manifest as a program malfunction. The longer an …
Modern debuggers contain one more debugging information window that can be very useful in debugging your program, and that is the call stack window. When your program calls a function, you already know that it bookmarks the current location, makes the function call, and then returns. How does it know …
While stepping (covered in lesson ) is useful for examining each individual line of your code in isolation, in a large program, it can take a long time to step through your code to even get to the point where you want to examine in more detail. Fortunately, modern debuggers …
In the previous lesson (), we started exploring how to manually debug problems. In that lesson, we offered some criticisms of using statements to print debug text: Debug statements clutter your code. Debug statements clutter the output of your program. Debug statements require modification of your code to both add …
In the previous lesson, we explored a strategy for finding issues by running our programs and using guesswork to home in on where the problem is. In this lesson, we’ll explore some basic tactics for actually making those guesses and collecting information to help find issues. Let’s start with an …
When debugging a program, in most cases the vast majority of your time will be spent trying to find where the error actually is. Once the issue is found, the remaining steps (fixing the issue and validating that the issue was fixed) are often trivial in comparison. In this lesson, …
Let’s say you’ve written a program, and it’s not working correctly — the code compiles fine, but when you run it, you’re getting an incorrect result. You must have a semantic error somewhere. How can you find it? If you’ve been following best practices by writing a little bit of …
