The effort devoted to minor bugs

[jack]

*sigh* There were other more funadmental problems, but instrumental in the bug was my muddling the precedence of "&" and "==". Obviously, we all make these mistakes sometimes. And I've got a lot better at avoiding minor mistakes as I've taken a more professional approach to programming.

But does everyone else (who programs) still find such typos happening?

For that matter, surely there is room for improvement in editors. Most people I know seem to use emacs, UltraEdit at work, vi if they're contrary, or Visual Studio if that's what they're using. But without going into details of which I've thought a lot, there seems a lot more that could be done to make minor errors, time spent comprehending code, etc, which eats up lots of productivity better? Surely it's the most obvious project for any programmer to want to work on?

Comments

A good compiler can help:

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, good point. *That's* an area which has improved immensely.

Memo to self: do avoid warnings.

Re: A good compiler can help:

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

Memo to cartesiandemon: Set -Werror in your Makefile unless your system headers are bollixed.

Re: A good compiler can help:

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Zero-warning is supposedly being adopted as company policy. But at the moment there are still too many warnings from other people's edits for it to be plausible to deal with them all :(

Re: A good compiler can help:

[ewx.livejournal.com]

That's why you turn -Werror on everywhere - so that people can't even compile until they've eliminated warnings from the change.

Re: A good compiler can help:

[ewx.livejournal.com]

System headers are exempted from warnings in vaguely recent versions of GNU C (essentially they use -isystem.)