The last ever C programming mistake

[goldfish]

if (authorisation = "yes") {
launchmissiles();
}

[goldfish]

Anyone find the problem yet?

[scorcer]

the answer is "epswiche clams"


no??, is it the spelling of authoriZation??

[NeoNemesis]

Im gonna go with, theres no 'else' so wouldn't it do the launchmissles() no matter what?

[goldfish]

Nope

spelling means nothing, and I'm english so i spell it authorisation

[mcadam]

spaces between authorisation and = sign??

[goldfish]

nope, but closer

[NeoNemesis]

no 'then' so the launchmissles() would be separate from the 'if'.


not sure seeing as how i don't know c

[jarcher]

Originally Posted by goldfish

if (authorisation = "yes") {
launchmissiles();
}

I don't know a thing about programing, or spelling for that matter
but i would say that
authorisation= launchmissles

[MrPewty]

The Brackets? I seem to remember those brackets hiding text in Pascal, but that was 15 years ago, and I haven't done any programming since. Never did C.

[NeoNemesis]

im gonna go with you, now that i think about it. WHen I did c++, I never used parenthesis. Heck, neither in basic too.

[MrPewty]

Originally Posted by MrPewty

The Brackets? I seem to remember those brackets hiding text in Pascal, but that was 15 years ago, and I haven't done any programming since. Never did C.

That would be the curly brackets around launchmissles();



Hmmm. Now that I think back, maybe it was * * that hid text.

Maybe the ";" is in the wrong place, not being on the end of the line(after the last bracket).

Maybe I'm rambling...

[Phantom]

if (authorisation = "yes") {(launchmissiles)};


Makes more sense to me. Then again, I'm not a programmer. ::

[goldfish]

nope, launchmissiles() is a perfectly normal bit of code.

You're not gunna get it, unless Kodo comes along all of a sudden

SPOILER:














its the authorisaton="yes" part. when you are comparing two values, you use ==, !=, >, < .... the = charachter signifies the operation of setting a variable. That condition says that if (set authorisation to yes) works correctly, then... So, prodvided the variable can be set, it will always return true, regardless of what authorisation was to start with.

[Maxwell]

I knew that but didn't see your first post until after you posted the answer, honest!

Here are some other real-life software catstrophic failures:
http://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/bugse.html

see also: http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthr...562#post507562

[evilevets]

() is going to launch missiles regardless?


Steve

[goldfish]

No, (authorisation = yes) makes authorisation equal to yes, rather than checking if it equals yes or not. To check it, it needs to be if (authorisation == yes).

[NeoNemesis]

ahhh, in C++ I used to spend hours trying to figure out what I was going wrong, turned out to be just that.

[NeoNemesis]

I'm learning a bit of PHP and this seems like it would catch quite a few people. So whats wrong with this one?

$blah = "Hello";
print ('$blah and Welcome');

Goldfish, stay outta this one!

[animatorStrike]

You don't use print in PHP. You use echo...or at least I think so. And, you don't need to put the variable in the (). This is how I think it should be:

$blah = "Hello";
echo $blah (' and Welcome');