July 2009
Intermediate to advanced
544 pages
11h 24m
English
Content preview from Why Programs Fail, 2nd Edition
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CHAPTER 14 Isolating Cause–Effect Chains
This chapter presents a way of narrowing down failure causes even further. By extracting and comparing program states, delta debugging automatically isolates the variables and values that cause the failure, resulting in a cause–effect chain of the failure:” variable x was 42; therefore p became null; and thus the program failed.”
14.1 USELESS CAUSES
In Chapter 13, we saw how to isolate inputs, code changes, or schedules that cause a given failure. In many cases, such causes directly lead to the defect in question. There are cases, though, where a difference in the input, for instance, gives few clues, if any, to the nature of the error. This is particularly true if program processes input at several ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.