Typical Errors in C

Lint is a great tool. repeat after me lint is a great tool and if somebody is not using it he/she is does not respect himself and his time... It's simply stupid to spent time debugging errors that lint can find.

Non-terminated comment, "accidentally" terminated by some subsequent comment, with the code in between swallowed.
        a=b; /* this is a bug
        c=d; /* c=d will never happen */
Accidental assignment/Accidental Booleans
        if(a=b) c;      /* a always equals b */
Depending on your viewpont, the bug in the language is that the assignment operator is too easy to confuse with the equality operator; or maybe the bug is that C doesn't much care what constitutes a boolean expression: (a=b) is not a boolean expression! (but C doesn't care)

Identifiers NOT To Use in C Programs by Stan Brown.
Frequent Mistakes in C Programs -- List of common mistakes made by undergrad programmers at UWO. Based on a list of marking codes used in the CompSci department.

Lint, Debugging

Typical errors

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Last modified: February 28, 2008