Correctness

One thing to watch out for is the type of the variables. We will use the same sorting procedure from the previous lecture as an example.

In line,
for (us = 1; us <= nelt; us++) {

"us" is a signed int whereas "nelt" is an unsigned integer.

Could there be any problems ? The answer is YES. Let's see,

On a 32-bit machine the range of signed integer is from (-2^31) to (2^31 - 1) whereas the range of unsigned ineger is from 0 to (2^32 -1)

Lets assume,  nelt = 2^31
us++ is going to overflow after (2^31 -1) and we will get to  the largest negative number (-2^31) and the inequality
                us < nelt
        will still hold.

Some compilers generate warning, some implementations convert the int type to unsigned int type.
You can write a short program to experiment such kind of things:-

main ()
{
    unsigned int x;
    int y;
    x = 0x80000000;
    y = 0x80000000;
    if ( y < x)
          printf ("yes"); // no type cast.
    else
          printf("no");  // int has been converted to unsigned int.
}

Please Note:
It is important how you interpret the bits. This is going to help you in Assignment 1 too.Take the instruction, figure out what the bit
pattern is, group them into 8 bits, and note the ASCII character corresponding to this pattern. Some useful "gdb" commands for doing
this:-

 x/c
 x/s
 x/i
 

Testing

For a complicated program you have to generate a whole lot of test cases, like the one that stresses the program, but always make sure to
be aware of what the O/P is going to be.

sort(int *array, int nelt)
{
 int i;
 for( i=0; i < nelt; i++)
        array[i] = i;
}

More to follow in the upcoming lectures.