How Not to Program in C++

Answers 249

This sort of problem occurs on most machines with a floating-point

processor. On the other hand, if you have an old machine that uses soft-

ware to do the floating-point, you’ll probably get the right answer. That’s

because, in general, software floating-point uses only enough bits to do the

work.

To fix the program, we need to turn the main loop into:

while (1)

{

// Volatile keeps the optimizer from

// putting the result in a register

volatile float result;

result = number1 + number2;

if (result == number1)

break;

Answer 74: The problem is that the words are stored in the input file in alpha-

betical order and the tree is unbalanced. Thus, when ...