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A couple of year ago, I worked for a compagny who were making vision sensing application for wood machinery. Their code (in C++) was a lot complicated, with lots of subclassing, and for the worst part of it, almost every options parameters controlling the code sequence were implemented with #if #then to "save some processor time". (The main core of the program was developped in Turbo-Dos like 15 years ago, then ported to Visual 6.0. It's why they used those #if #then...) The code was more than 3 millions line of code!!!
That's it for the introduction. (You may already laugh!!)
But one day, I came across a fonction used to connect a RS232 port.
This is the interesting part inside the fonction :
...some code here
if( strcmp( lpszPortName, "COM1") == 0 );
{
// Connect the COM1 port
...some code here
}
else if( strcmp( lpszPortName, "COM2") == 0 )
{
// Connect the COM2 port
...some code here
}
else
...
So I asked one of the guy who were working there since a very long time, why they didn't corrected that error... He told me "It always worked well before, and the compiler never notified any error so leave it like that..."
Do you know why I found this little error in 3 millions of code lines? Because this sequence was part of a library used in the main program, and because that library had never been recompiled since its first release 10 years before! For some reasons, I just forgot to follow a little "office rule" that was to never recompile all projects in a workspace in a single shot. I did it "oh unfortunately" then the compiler hit that error immediately!!
Progamming looks like taking drugs...
I think I did an overdose.
-- modified at 3:09 Tuesday 13th March, 2007
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I had to stare at that for a good 30 seconds before I spotted the bug. Gosh - I need a decent compiler at this time in the morning to help me!
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Ok, it took me a while to see the ";" after the first "if". You would have done me a great favor by simply mentioning that in your message. It's funny!
I just wanted to say that I know what you mean. I'm stuck with something similar. Lots of code doing nothing. I can't believe you actually took the time to count the lines of code! All I can say is that the program I have to work on has about 30000 files of source organized in about 2000 folders.
So, if there were about 400 lines of code per file, that would make a total of 12 million lines of code! However, that's an understatement, since most files have more than 400 lines of code.
When I run into errors like this I think a lot about whether I should fix them or not, since doing so might actually be causing a bug. ) I took up assembly language a long time ago, just because of this. C++ and all other high level programming languages are supposed to be related a great deal to human language. But people say stupid things all the time.
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Real nasty ones these; you just read straight over the problem and not notice it 9 times out of 10.
Steve
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This is a good candidate for the Subtle bugs forum.
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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Not if they determined "it's not a bug".
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And believe what? For them, it wasn't a bug, since it always worked "well" before! At first, they tought it was a typing mistake made accidentaly by me until they looked into SourceSafe and agreed that the mistake was there too, since a couple of years before!
Progamming looks like taking drugs...
I think I did an overdose.
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Yeah, definitively!
Progamming looks like taking drugs...
I think I did an overdose.
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I overdosed a long time ago…
INTP
"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence."Edsger Dijkstra
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I'm in detoxification right now. Should be able to get hooked again in a few months...
Progamming looks like taking drugs...
I think I did an overdose.
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well, it did not take me even a minute to spot that. i caught the error as soon as i read that there was an error in the code.
Regards,
Vijay.
God may not give us what we 'want', but he surely gives us what we 'need'.
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who else sees this and just laughs:
if (whatever == true){
chkBox.Checked = true;
}else{
chkBox.Checked = false;
}
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In opposition to my own statement below I would probably do the following in this case.
CallUpdateFunction(chBox.Checked)
CleaKO
"I think you'll be okay here, they have a thin candy shell. 'Surprised you didn't know that." - Tommy Boy "Fill it up again! Fill it up again! Once it hits your lips, it's so good!" - Frank the Tank (Old School)
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if (whatever == true) {
chkBox.Checked = true;
} else {
chkBox.Checked = false;
} else {
...
}
/ravi
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This was discussed in an earlier thread.
Kevin
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Well, this takes that a step farther; not just the test, but the setting of another boolean.
Every once in a while I catch myself doing that and I have to slap my hand.
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Its junk.
chkBox.Checked = whatever;
█▒▒▒▒▒██▒█▒██
█▒█████▒▒▒▒▒█
█▒██████▒█▒██
█▒█████▒▒▒▒▒█
█▒▒▒▒▒██▒█▒██
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Captain See Sharp wrote: chkBox.Checked = whatever;
yeap you right.. you giving variable some unknown garbage value by doing so!
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i agree - i would aslo have used this
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I see it all the time.
have also found this before
chkBox.Checked = !(whatever == true);
I think(hope) that these are normally incremental errors where the code has been tweaked bit by bit over the course of years. Boolean logic always seems to have people a bit stumped though and i'm never sure why.
I've seen a few things like these in the past
if (whatever || true) doStuff();
if (whatever && false) doStuff();
Russ
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I'll admit to occasionally ending up with something like this after hacking out part of a complex conditional or breaking it into several smaller lines, and not doing a sanity check with the remaining chunks.
--
Rules of thumb should not be taken for the whole hand.
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I do that all the time when I debug and test extreme cases which are hard to simulate using input. I wouldn't want to be caught forgetting about them though.
--
For proper viewing, take red pill now
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