Hacker News Reader

With C++, a million errors are oftentimes one error a million different ways.

Flashback... When trying C for the first time, I ported a ~300 line Pascal program. I had read C syntax for some time, and the program was rather simple so I felt confident in the job.

After transcribing the ~300 lines I tried to compile for the first time: 3728 errors and warnings...

I read through the code and everything looked correct, so I gave up.

Picked it up again some weeks later. Turned out that I had, by force of habit, erroneously added a semicolon at the end of macro definition on line 3. Fixing that it compiled flawlessly.

At the time I was also unaware that I was actually using a C++ compiler, djgpp, which I'm sure did the error count no favors.

Ah djgpp, rhide and allegro, that was my gateway drug.

Same here! A while back I found some of my old Allegro games from a high school CS class (choked back chunks), and with little effort got them to compile on modern macOS. It was quite nostalgic.

Its one error after name mangling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com