Cxx Tips

I'm getting this error when I run make

Makefile:62: *** missing separator.  Stop.

This is on of my favorites. It's often because you have four spaces instead of a tab prefixing the line.

How to turn on or off asserts in C++

$ cat x.c
#include <assert.h>

int main(int a, char** b) {
        assert(0);
        return 0;
}
$ gcc x.c -DNDEBUG
$ ./a.out
$ gcc x.c
$ ./a.out
Assertion failed: 0, file x.c, line 4
Abort (core dumped)

NB you will have compiled away all the asserts by defining NDEBUG!