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 …
Software errors are prevalent. It’s easy to make them, and it’s hard to find them. In this chapter, we’ll explore topics related to the finding and removal of bugs within our C++ programs, including learning how to use the integrated debugger that is part of our IDE. Although debugging tools …
A is a reusable sequence of statements designed to do a particular job. Functions you write yourself are called functions. A is an expression that tells the CPU to execute a function. The function initiating the function call is the , and the function being called is the or function. …
Consider the following program: #include <iostream> int main() { // get a value from the user std::cout << “Enter an integer: “; int num{}; std::cin >> num; // print the value doubled std::cout << num << ” doubled is: ” << num * 2 << ‘\n’; return 0; } This …
The preceding lessons have introduced a lot of terminology and concepts that we’ll use in just about every program we create. In this lesson, we’ll walk through the process of integrating this knowledge into our first simple program. First, let’s create a program that asks the user to enter an …
Literals Consider the following two statements: std::cout << “Hello world!”; int x { 5 }; What are ‘”Hello world!”‘ and ‘5’? They are literals. A literal (also known as a literal constant) is a fixed value that has been inserted directly into the source code. Literals and variables both have …
Unlike some programming languages, C/C++ does not initialize most variables to a given value (such as zero) automatically. Thus when a variable is given a memory address to use to store data, the default value of that variable is whatever (garbage) value happens to already be in that memory address! …
