How Not to Program in C++

102 Chapter 5

Program 67: Let’s Play “Hide the Problem”

The following program dumps core with a floating-point divide error on UNIX.

This is puzzling because we do no floating-point operations.

In order to find the problem, we’ve put in a few

printf statements and dis-

covered that it’s happening somewhere before the function call. We can tell this

because we never see the “starting” message.

1 /************************************************

2 * Compute a simple average. Because this *

3 * takes a long time (?) we output some *

4 * chatter as we progress through the system. *

5 ************************************************/

6 #include <stdio.h>