CSC126 FUNDAMENTALS OF ALGORITHMS AND

COMPUTER PROBLEM SOLVING

CSC126 FUNDAMENTALS OF ALGORITHMS AND COMPUTER PROBLEM SOLVING 1

 LESSON OUTCOMES
Upon completion of this chapter, students should be able to:

 Describe what a computer program is

 Explain the importance of programming to computer use
 Appreciate the importance of good programs
 Recognize program errors
 Become familiar with the program design process

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In order for a program to be considered as a good program, it must have
the following:
RELIABILITY OF OUTPUT

1  A good program must be able to produce correct output.

 For that, during testing phase, a different set of input data is
used to ensure the reliability of the output.

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In order for a program to be considered as a good program, it must have
the following:

I N T E R AC T I V I T Y
 The interaction process between the user and the program

2 must be well defined.

 The interactivity is important so that the user knows the
processing status.
 User‐friendly programs allow the users to responds to
instruction correctly and allow users to key in valid input
thus minimizing the errors resulted from invalid data.

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  E xa m p l e o f a BA D p ro g ra m’ s o u t p u t s c re e n
This output produces the blinking cursor that expects the
user to enter some data. However, the kind of data to be
entered is unknown to the user.

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  E xa m p l e o f a G O O D p ro g ra m’ s o u t p u t s c re e n
This output screen tells the user what will be achieved when
entering the input data. The instruction helps the user to
enter data to be correctly processed by the program.

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In order for a program to be considered as a good program, it must have
the following:
P RO G R A M R EA DA B I L I T Y
 Readability is concerned with how other person views one’s
program. For programmers, the use of indention and
comments are common to improve the program’s readability.

3 a. Indentation
 Indentation helps in making the structure of the program
clearer and easier to read. A statement within a statement
should be indented to show the user which statements are
subordinated of the other.
 In C++, particularly, if‐else, while and do‐while statements
should be indented. Embedded braces { } are also indented
to make it easier to find the matching pairs.
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3

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In order for a program to be considered as a good program, it must have
the following:

a. Comments
 Some explanatory notes or comments (sometimes
referred to as internal documentation) should be place in

3 the program coding to improve its readability. In other

words, comments are there for the convenience of anyone
reading the program.
 Comments can be placed anywhere within in a program
and they will NOT be executed by the compiler.
Commenting out a section of code is very useful in a
debugging process.

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In order for a program to be considered as a good program, it must have
the following:

a. Comments
 Some explanatory notes or comments (sometimes
referred to as internal documentation) should be place in

3 the program coding to improve its readability. In other

words, comments are there for the convenience of anyone
reading the program.
 Comments can be placed anywhere within in a program
and they will NOT be executed by the compiler.
Commenting out a section of code is very useful in a
debugging process.

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  C++ supports two types of comments:
 Line comment
 A line comment begins with two slashes (//) and
continues to the end of line.

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  Block comment
 Block comment begins with the symbol /* and end with
symbol */. Block comments are conveniently used for
statements that span across two or more lines.

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Although the principle in programming is for efficiently produce
readable and error‐free programs that work correctly, errors or
sometimes are called bugs can occur at any time.
TYPES OF
PROGRAM
ERRORS
2. SYNTAX
p

Errors

1.RUN-TIME 3.LOGIC
Errors Errors

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1
RU N - T I M E E R RO RS
Run‐time errors occur during the execution of a program and
are detected by the compiler.

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1 RU N - T I M E E R RO RS

Explanation:
Attempting to divide by zero in the above statement causes a
run‐time error such as “Floating point division by error” or
divide‐error exception”. The method for detecting errors
after a program has been executed is called debugging process.
A debugger program is available in C++ for detecting errors
while a program is being executed.

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 SY N TA X E R RO RS

2 A syntax error is an error in the structure or spelling of a

statement. This error can be detected by the compiler during
compilation of the program.

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2 SY N TA X E R RO RS

Explanation:
i. Invalid use of backslash (/) in line 6
ii. Missing semicolon (;) in line 6
iii.Keyword cout is misspelled in line 7
iv. Invalid use of insertion symbol (>>) in line 7
v. Missing a closing quote (“) in line 7

A C++ statement with correct syntax will be accepted by the

compiler without any error messages. Nevertheless, a statement
or program can be syntactically correct but still be logically
incorrect. Consequently, incorrect result would be produced.

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3 LO G I C E R RO RS

 Logic errors refer to the unexpected or unintentional

errors resulted from some flaw in the program’s logic.
 Logic error is very difficult to detect since compiler cannot
detect this error.
 The only way to detect it is by testing the program
thoroughly and comparing its output against manually
calculated results.

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 Some indications of logic errors include:
i. No numerical output
This is caused by a missing numerical output in a cout
statement.
Example:

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 The output for the above program statement is

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 ii. Unappealing or misaligned output
This either caused by an error in cout statement or
the use of formatting output statement (\n, \t).
Example:

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 The output for the above program statement is

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 iii. Incorrect numerical results
This is caused by either incorrect values or data types
assigned to the variables used in an expression, incorrect
arithmetic expression, an omission of a statement,
round off error, or improper use sequence of statement.

Example :

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 Where fnum is of type character. The
3 valid character to be assigned is
char fnum = ‘A’;

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 iv. Premature program termination
If the error is detected during the program execution, a
run‐time error occurs that results in an error message being
generated or abnormal and premature program
termination.

Example:

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 Explanation:
The logic errors are:
i. Assigning invalid values to variable of type integer in

3
line 1
ii. Attempting to divide by zero in line 3
iii. Missing numerical output in line 4
iv. Taking the square root of a negative number in line 5

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 Kahoot Quiz

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 Describe any TWO (2) characteristics of good programs.
 What is syntax error?
 What is logic error?
 What is the purpose of comments in a program?

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