Stupidest Programming Mistakes

[aaeamdar]

I had this:

auto_mode = ~auto_select1 + 2(~auto_select2) + 3(~auto_select3);

Where auto_mode is later used in a switch{case:}, and auto_selectNs are variouss rc_dig_ins.

Can someone spot the error there? Yeah, 2() is not a valid method. So I changed it to this:

auto_mode = ~auto_select1 + 2*(~auto_select2) + 3*(~auto_select3);

And it still didn't work. Gee whiz. What is wrong now. It gives me a run-time unexpectedness glitch where auto_mode is calculated to be 246 or some nonsense like that. OK, fixed that by not using the binary complement and instead used the logical complement (in a #define) and it works.

In another one we had:

printf("Some motor values %d %d %d", 1,2,3);//Whatever

And nothing was printing. Gosh, that sure was weird. Well, it turns out that we failed to import stdio.h (or anything else that gives us access to printfs). And then, to make things worse, the C language is so incredibly stupid that all it gives you is a warning because it's not prototyped. Since we had been using some other methods that weren't prototyped (may have been a few in Kevins Code) those warnings got mushed in with the others.

Thank goodness for Java.

Paul Dennis