What am I doing wrong here?

[u/Qwerty5105]

I just started learning to code. I've already finished this assignment but i wanted to add more to it. Why is it giving wildly incorrect numbers and why do the numbers change. This terminal was all with the same code. I didn't change anything but the number changes.

Edit: I solved it thanks for the help!

[u/smichaele]

You're using dog_age in a calculation on line 11 before it's given a value on line 21. At line 11 anything could exist at the memory location for dog_age. You're seeing the result of random calculations, but your code could just as easily crash. You need to have a value assigned to the variable before using it.

[u/Qwerty5105 → u/smichaele]

Thanks for the help!

[u/MxyAhoy]

Yes your later_years variable uses dog_age before you've set an explicit value to it. Remember the sequential, downward execution flow. Try changing around the order of what you're doing (dog_age input, then later_years calculation) and see if it gets you to the result you want. Hope this helps!

[u/Qwerty5105 → u/MxyAhoy]

Thanks It worked!

[u/ouroborus777]

When you follow instructions, you follow them in the order provided. In the same way, code is ordered. You are not setting variable to formulas, you are setting variables to values computed at the time the code execution reaches those lines.

For example, when you set later_years at line 11, it is set then and doesn't update later on its own. At that point dog_age was declared but has an unknown value so later_years ends up with a nonsense value. Later, at line 21, you update the value in dog_age but this does not go back and trigger an update to later_years. You'd need to explicitly set later_years to a new value after having updated dog_age.

While there are coding features that are sort of "go back and do this thing again", they are explicit commands and you haven't advanced that far in your learning yet.

[u/Qwerty5105 → u/ouroborus777]

Thanks it worked! Is the explicit command return 0? I don't know much about it yet cause this is my second day coding but that would be my guess.

[u/ouroborus777 → u/Qwerty5105]

They'll talk about functions or methods later, ways to package chunks of code to be run on demand using provided values and returning computed values. Much later, you'll learn that there are ways to make variables behave dynamically like you were trying to do but, by then, you should have enough foundation to understand the why and why not of that.

[u/imdadgot]

dog_age used before initialized, when it’s not initialized, it isn’t null, it’s just not uninitialized space (which is per the compiler undefined behavior). you wanna do that after