Eric the Red

What is the longest time you've spent staring at a program to find out why your getting an error?

I've just stared at my program for 2 hours, and finally found my problem. This time it was a memory leak in c++, ouch those hurt.

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RobEasy

An hour. I was developing an array and figured out that I needed to use curly braces instead of the parentheses

jayme

Doesn't debugging involve finding bugs that cause the program to run incorrectly. Using braces instead of parenthesis is more like just a mistake. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course.

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zorin

Just an error? Big programs I can spend hours looking for the problem but then thats to be expected because there are hundreds of lines of code. Sometimes it can be because you have implemented a function into the program and there was a much easier way. That can take a long time to fix.

Modern compilers make the work easier for you. If you know what your looking for then its quite easy to fix. I spent 30mins before trying to look for a problem and it turns out it was staring at me strait in the face...I was spelling cout as count :eek:

Eric the Red

"1 error"

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nnxion

Half a week ago, 13 hours for one error, wasn't even in the code, just my logic was flawed. :eek:

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DaWei

Wait'll you don't know if it's in the code or the hardware....

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megamind5005

LMAO!! Ah the things in life ... I was doing some revision for my Computing exam next week while casually surfing the threads, and not only do I come across a thread about debugging but one that contains good examples of each type of error that I have in my notes right here in front of me: Syntax Error, and Logic Error.

... even more ironic that I have an error in my hand-written notes. I've written "A logic error is a flaw in the way the program is designed such as executing 2+2 when you mean 2+2"[sic]... well, I know what I meant

If someone could just give us an exmaple of a good arithmetic error, we'll have a full set and I'll be happy. Any divisions by zero, anyone?

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Harakim

I was writing a program that used recv() and send(). Anyway, recv always returned -1 for some reason. I spent several days conducting all kinds of test and then just decided to disregard it. The program still works to this day and probably recv() still returns -1. I don't know why!!

Booooze

Can't remember what the actual error was, but I spent all night looking for it, and then found it. Turned out I didn't declare the variable :p Mind you, it was VB6 :p *death trap*

btw, don't drink while programming. It doesn't help. Although, I did get surpisingly far in programming duck hunt after drinking a whole lot.