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Re^2: Greatest programming mistakes and what to learn fromby Stevie-O (Friar) |
on Dec 23, 2004 at 07:00 UTC ( [id://417013]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
Bravo!
Whenever I'm debugging a problem, and I have no idea what's going wrong, my first instinct is to say: Print out *all* the variables.
Me: "Hey, print the value of X" Them: "I know what it is. It's 3." Me: "Print it out anyway." Them: "Fine." Output: 3 Me: "Good. Now print the value of Y..." Repeat for many, many variables (incidentally, this often became code that logged gobs of data to a file). Eventually, we'd get to a variable where my coworker thought it was one value, and the variable was another value. "Oh, crap! I see the problem..." This is especially necessary for languages like C where a runaway pointer or stack overflow can trash a variable from a completely different context. Fortunately, they're starting to understand my debugging methods now :)
--Stevie-O
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