Comments on: why does my program not work and then when I run it in debug it works from that point forward

By: carlosdl

carlosdl — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:16:12 +0000

Juju, I don’t think debuggers perform any magic, nor they remove bugs. Loosely speaking, they just let you run the program step by step.

By: carlosdl

carlosdl — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:14:18 +0000

Ok.

There are some RPG experts here in the community.

I think you might get better results by creating a new question, but make sure you include all pertinent details and include at least RPG as a tag. Maybe I should not recommend creating a new question, but in this specific case I think it could be your best option.

By: jdre706

jdre706 — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:37:03 +0000

this is a simple RPG program that reads a file for records that have not been processed, valitdates against Item master, then calls another program to create a change record in another file then comes back to this program and updates 2 more files. the program runs without any errors but was failing to write the change record in the called program until it was put in debug.

By: carlosdl

carlosdl — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:00:07 +0000

That would depend of the specific operation being performed, and the error it encounters. Sometimes these are logic errors, for example a non-blocking network operation whose output is not validated before executing other related network operations. If the first operation is delayed due to network problems, the second one could be fired before the first one ends, and that could lead to some kind of error.

What programming language are you using ? can you post your code and provide a little more information ?

By: jdre706

jdre706 — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:44:43 +0000

in your last statement about possible some operations encounter errors when running fast, would a system error be generated or would program continue processing?

By: carlosdl

carlosdl — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:38:14 +0000

I don’t think it has something to do with compression.

I have seen similar situations, but always was because of the different conditions when running the program in debug mode.

For example, depending on the programming environment, it is possible that when running in debug mode, the program executable is run from a different location (path), and thus uses different versions of other involved files (for example, INI files).

Also, depending on the specific operations the program performs, it is possible that some operations encounter errors when running fast without interruptions, but work well when you slow down the process when running step by setp in debug mode.