Beginning Programming with C++ For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8

Debugging Your Programs, Part I

In This Chapter

Avoiding introducing errors needlessly

Creating test cases

Peeking into the inner workings of your program

Fixing and retesting your programs

You may have noticed that your programs often don’t work the first time you run them. In fact, I have seldom, if ever, written a nontrivial C++ program that didn’t have some type of error the first time I tried to execute it.

This leaves you with two alternatives: You can abandon a program that has an error, or you can find and fix the error. I assume that you want to take the latter approach. In this chapter, I first help you distinguish between types of errors and show you how to avoid errors in the first place. Then you get to find and eradicate two bugs that originally plagued the Conversion program in Chapter 3.

Identifying Types of Errors

Two types of errors exist — those that C++ can catch on its own and those that the compiler can’t catch. Errors that C++ can catch are known as compile-time or build-time errors. Build-time errors are generally easier to fix because the compiler ...