lost a curly brace or something in a sea of code

Programming Questions

nikosveik..

lost a curly brace or something in a sea of code

in Programming Questions • 1 year ago

Hey there,
So I've spent the last couple weeks working on an arcade shooter for my computer science final. Everything's gone really well so far, and the code's grown to around 500 lines. But I was adding comments to some sections of my code earlier today, and after I had finished I tried to run my program. I got a compile error, "unexpected token: void", highlighting the very last line of a tab I wasn't even editing.

I've gotten an error on a miscellaneous tab before, it turned out that I forgot a curly brace way over in something else. I only edit one block of code at a time (to make bughunting easier if one creeps up), so it didn't take long to find the missing brace in that situation. In this current instance I added comments to a sizable tab that didn't have any comments before, but I'm pretty sure that's all I did (though I must be wrong). For some reason it broke my code.

After much searching I still couldn't find the error. Methods I've tried:
1. My project is too interconnected to comment out blocks to find the one that's causing the issue.
2. I've tried inserting a decoy syntax error into various places in the code, then compiling to see if it picks up the decoy error before the mystery error, to find the relative location of the mystery error.
3. I've also gone through the code by hand, but it's frustrating to look through code that you know you've written correctly, and I feel like I'd miss the error if I skimmed right over it.

What's the best way to find an error that eludes the error-checker?

Here's the source, if anyone's interested. No need to find the actual error, advice will hopefully be enough.
http://encodable.com/cgi-bin/filechucker.cgi?action=landing&path=/&file=warpdrv.zip

An older version of the exported applet, it should pretty much look like this if it compiles right:
http://nik-storage.s3.amazonaws.com/warpdrv/index.html

Replies(5)

v.k.

Re: lost a curly brace or something in a sea of code

1 year ago

Well, that's a good question, I would like to know if there is a method to track this down. I have been trough this some times and managed to find the error double checking places i just had edited. They were very far from the place that was highlighted when compiler stops... Redo your way to the code backwards, maybe you can find it. Last time i did a mess with one right parentheses, that was enough...

Chrisir

Re: lost a curly brace or something in a sea of code

1 year ago

file / tab: lres
lresDrawRender(){
missing } at the end of func

Chrisir

[edited]

nikosveik..

Re: lost a curly brace or something in a sea of code

1 year ago

Aha! It was indeed a line that I just commented. It was a funny one too, with a brace following a semicolon. I must have started typing in the comment, then changed my mind and deleted everything up until the semicolon, thus getting rid of the brace.

I don't know what I learned from this, but I am certainly relieved to have my code back. Thank you so much!

jdeisenbe..

Re: lost a curly brace or something in a sea of code

1 year ago

First, Auto-Format is your friend. Once everything is lined up properly, your eye can usually find missing braces quickly.

Also, you can download jEdit ( http://jedit.org/) When you click after an opening or closing brace, jEdit highlights the corresponding brace and draws a line in the gutter to connect those two lines. There's also a syntax colorization module (see http://wiki.processing.org/w/JEdit_as_External_IDE for details).

Chrisir

Re: lost a curly brace or something in a sea of code

1 year ago

Hello,

yes, I used Auto-Format to find your bug.
I use it all the time - just CTRL-T. You can use it separately in each tab / file.
When after using it your brackets { } have the wrong position (e.g. wrong distance from left) you can tell, something is wrong.

Processing itself can already show you which } belongs to which { - lights them up if you move the cursor behind it.

jEdit sounds great!

There might be even better ways when running processing in eclipse.

General note: When something works and you change something and it stops working: Look at the place you changed. There something is wrong or causing something else to stop working. This general rule looks easy but people often fail to remember (I do forget it).

Greetings, Chrisir

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