Uninitialized variable makes a mysterious bug

Reason:

I used strtod() function in C, forgot to set errno to 0, then after calling strtod(), the value of errno is unpredictable.

When found the bug:

I tried to use Ptyhon ctypes module. In script mode, python pyCtypes.py always crash but in command line mode, the code becomes all right. It’s mysterious running Python in different ways turns out to give different results.

First, I thought it is clear that Python has some bug, otherwise the same Python code should give the same result.

Then I realized my Python code use a DLL routine using C language, and I recalled in the man page of “strtod”, it says we need to initialize errno value to zero every time before calling.

Example code:
Line 1 should be added to ensure correctness.

        errno = 0;
        vec->value[vec->len++] = strtod(temp, NULL);
        //vector_print(vec);
        if (errno != 0) {
            perror("strtod");
            fprintf(stderr, "%s\n", temp);
            exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
        }

Note:

WordPress supports syntax highlight.

I am using SyntaxHighlighter Evolved http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/syntaxhighlighter/.

Official documentation mentions another way: http://en.support.wordpress.com/code/posting-source-code/.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.