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Dividing by zero, on purpose

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by JD_Rushing November 01, 2013 03:53 AM

15 comments, last by Ezbez 10 years, 5 months ago

JD_Rushing

373

Author

November 01, 2013 03:53 AM

Just curious if anyone else does this.

Sometimes I have an if statement block I don't know is running. I know the code before, and after, the block is running fine.

So, I put a divide by zero after it. I know there are more sophisticated ways of debugging, and I have used them. But for a quick and dirty, I make an error by dividing by zero. I was going to stop the program anyways.

So I was just curious if anyone has ever purposely made an error in a section of code to see if part of it was running or not?

Khaiy

2,148

November 01, 2013 03:59 AM

I usually just put in a breakpoint and watch to see if it's hit or not. If I have something more complex, I debug in the console and have each block print a message each time it's executed, which lets me home in on what I'm looking for pretty quickly. The latter is also nice for hunting down more specific issues inside of a block, rather than just seeing if it's executing or not.

I've never thrown in a line meant to give my compiler a conniption, but I guess that would work as well as anything else.

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Dragonsoulj

3,213

November 01, 2013 04:30 AM

I'm with Khaiy. Depending on the language, I either go with breakpoints, alerts/message boxes, or debug printing (usually to the console, but, for instance, PHP and webpages, I just print to the page).

SiCrane

11,840

November 01, 2013 05:00 AM

The only time I've ever deliberately put a divide by zero into my code was to check if my exception handler was actually catching divide by zero and other non-C++ exceptions.

Postie

1,559

November 01, 2013 05:25 AM

If I'm about to head home for the day and I'm working on a piece of code that is incomplete but compilable, I'll type some garbage like: "dgsahjgda". That way when I come back to it in the morning If I forget where I was up to, it'll take me straight to the garbage when I try to compile.

I'll do the same if I'm doing some manual refactoring involving a lot of copy and pasting.

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tonemgub

2,009

November 01, 2013 07:24 AM

If I'm about to head home for the day and I'm working on a piece of code that is incomplete but compilable, I'll type some garbage like: "dgsahjgda". That way when I come back to it in the morning If I forget where I was up to, it'll take me straight to the garbage when I try to compile.

I'll do the same if I'm doing some manual refactoring involving a lot of copy and pasting.

I do this too, but instead of garbage, I write down the possible reason for why the code might be failing, or whatever thought I happened to have about it.

satanir

1,457

November 01, 2013 07:36 AM

I work mostly in C++, so I usually use __debugbreak() (or __asm int 3).

Paradigm Shifter

5,832

November 01, 2013 08:12 AM

If I'm about to head home for the day and I'm working on a piece of code that is incomplete but compilable, I'll type some garbage like: "dgsahjgda". That way when I come back to it in the morning If I forget where I was up to, it'll take me straight to the garbage when I try to compile.

I'll do the same if I'm doing some manual refactoring involving a lot of copy and pasting.

I do this too, but instead of garbage, I write down the possible reason for why the code might be failing, or whatever thought I happened to have about it.

#error

is probably what you are looking for.

Breakpoints is what the OP is looking for?

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satanir

1,457

November 01, 2013 08:16 AM

Breakpoints is what the OP is looking for?

Yep.

Paradigm Shifter

5,832

November 01, 2013 08:28 AM

#error is also good as a sanity check (is this bit of code even being compiled?!), which can occur if you have lots of conditional compilation going on (or inside a header file if you aren't sure whether it is being included).

EDIT: Dividing by zero isn't very reliable anyway, if you don't store the result it can be optimised out and floating point division by zero results in one of +/-infinity or NaN. If the compiler can detect an unconditional divide by zero it might give a compile time error too. So I second __debugbreak() or whatever does the same thing in your compiler.

EDIT2: Assuming C/C++ anyway

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Dividing by zero, on purpose

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