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Category: Errors

And my Hyper-V Raspi error

Posted on November 18, 2020November 16, 2020 by David

Seems to be with Visual Studio Code. I said yesterday that it had got into a funny state. Well I created a new VM and installed the Raspberry Pi OS that runs in a VM and after it updated tried installing VS Code on it.

It would have had the same problem had I let it. The problem is it when you install VS Code, it has some unmet dependencies and in fixing them it wants to remove 8 essential packages and this breaks apt which then gets in a funny state.

No one wants to see this scary message! So I think I may have to use the Code.headmelted.com version on Hyper-V for a while and see if this gets resolved with the next update of VS Code. Ah the jots of software development…

Modern C – a Free Ebook

Posted on September 9, 2020September 6, 2020 by David

This is the 2nd edition. Author Jens Gustedt has generously allowed a free version to be downloaded from his website.

If you like his book which is also published by Manning then you should consider buying a copy. He provides a 35% discount for the print or E book version.

I scanned the E-book and must admit, the bit on signal handling taught me a lot that I didn’t know.

The E-book is nearly 300 pages long in 19 chapters.

1566 Compile errors with just two characters!

Posted on May 11, 2020April 29, 2020 by David

When programmers have to explain why it took longer to get something working,you don’t often here reasons like this. A simple syntax error error took me an hour to find and fix. Yet it does happen and it happened to me today.

Oh sure you feel silly afterwards and it was only a 131 lines of C code. The very last of the 1566 compile errors was unexpected end-of-file found on line 132. That was a red herring of sorts. The error actually occurred right at the start of the program.

Here’s the first 10 lines. It should be quite easy to spot but when you are looking through 130 lines with a hint that it’s messed up the end of the file, it’s not so obvious.

// tictactoe.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string>
#include <time.h>

int playerIsX, computerFirst, x, y, danger, turn;
char board[3][3];  // holds X, O and space
char playerPiece, computerPiece;

In case you haven’t spotted it, it’s the missing .h; it should be string.h not string in that 3rd #include. An obvious-in-hindsight clue is the error listing. The files that are mentioned don’t have .h on them. (cctype, cstdint etc. Those are C++ files and string is a C++ header file. Also mention of namespace in the error message is also a big hint.

Still I think that sets a record for the most errors generated in a C compile! The compiler btw was Visual Studio 2019’s C/C++ compiler.

Some useful tips for Visual Studio Code

Posted on March 26, 2020April 3, 2020 by David

The more I use Visual Studio Code, the more I like it and it is definitely one of the slickest pieces of software running on Linux. But I’ve found a few minor problem that are easily fixed so before I forget the fixes, here they are:

UTF-16 Instead of UTF-8

You copy a file in from somewhere but when you try to compile it you get: fatal error: UTF-16 (LE) byte order mark detected in ‘/home/david/Projects/Asteroids/asteroids.c’, but encoding is not supported.

Fixing this is quite easy; you just need to change the file type from UTF-16 to UTF-8. Visual Studio Code shows the file details at the bottom:

Here you can see it’s UTF-16 LE. Click on UTF-16 and you’ll get a popup menu. Click Save with Encoding and you’ll get a list of Encodings. Just pick UTF-8 and the problem is solved.

You want to save or copy the C/C++ JSON files

But you can only do it by copying and pasting when its in the editor. The problem is they are in a hidden folder under the main folder. Visual Studio Code’s C/C++ extension uses these to hold build, debug etc. configuration details. It’s handy saving them out with source files but a bit slow doing it individually via the editor.

Visual Studio Code uses the main folder (I call mine Projects) and the four JSON files are in ~/Projects/.vscode

On Linux any folder that starts with a . is hidden.

If you use File Explorer, you can tell it to show hidden folders and files by clicking the top button (highlighted) then ticking the Show Hidden Files box. The three folders that were hidden including .vscode are now visible and you can browse, view, copy files etc.