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From: rg20+@andrew.cmu.edu (Rick Francis Golembiewski)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: Re: Good Programming stops guru |||| and BNF of C++
Message-ID: <8bXHP_y00VIFALti1O@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 11 Jan 91 03:53:46 GMT
References: <4381@mindlink.UUCP>
Organization: Class of '92, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 61
In-Reply-To: <4381@mindlink.UUCP>


A Few trick that I have found to be very helpful in dealing with
pointers, is that you should initalize all pointers to NULL, and also
EXPECT all pointers that you deal with to be NULL. (ie make loops like

while (foo != NULL) {..} (and be sure that foo will at some point be NULL)

Also if you have pointers to pointers, like:

foo->bar->var, be sure that foo and bar are NOT NULL. before doing

foo->bar->var=value;

Also watch when passing constant arguments, for instance calling:
foo(A,B,0,D)

for

int foo(A,B,C,D)
double A,B,C,D;
{
}
is wrong, it should be
foo(A,B,0.0,D)
         ^
         |
   This a a FP argument while 0 is interpreted as an integer argument,
so the values for C & D will be mangled (I've been bitten on this one
with Lattice a few times).

Another thing, if you have an array like:
char foo[MAXLEN];

When you do loops include,
i=0;
while( i<MAXLEN) {foo[i++]='\0'....}

That way you don't overrun the size of the array, this is especially
important when doing string functions, as there might be some without
proper '\0' terminations.  

In general it's a good idea to initiallize ALL of your variables, as
some compilers initalize vars to 0 while others may not.

Try not to have lots of global variables, but if a variable gets
passed to most every function it is probabily a good idea to make it
globa (things like window & screen pointers are things that come to
mind). Try to break down your code into small modules so that they are
easier to debug, (and so that the smaller lower level modules may be
used in other programs without rewriting them).  Don't make
allocations (of memory, or any ofther resource ie [ports, audio
chanels]) unless you need them, adnd then FREE THEM UP WHEN YOU ARE
DONE!  (ie fclose(file), free(memory) etc.).  There are certainly
several other good programming practices, but I think that this post
is long enough already.  I'm sure that if I've made any mistakes in
the above I'll get plenty of flames for it...

//     Rick Golembiewski  rg20+@andrew.cmu.edu  \\
\\       #include stddisclaimer.h               //
 \\  "I never respected a man who could spell" //
  \\               -M. Twain                  //