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From: kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)
Subject: Re: GDB Woes Continued...
Date: 1998/02/02
Message-ID: <1998Feb2.141441.1@eisner>#1/1
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In article <dewar.886438670@merv>, dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

> Of course different people have different styles, but too many programmers
> today are introduced only to the hack-and-debug school of coding. It is
> interesting to present the clean-room model to typical programmers today
> (this is the approach in which developers are not permitted to run their
> code at all to test it, let alone to debug it -- the idea is to have
> the developers develop solid correct code, and then let a separate team
> do the testing).

Without going that far, I have recently had the opportunity to write 25K
(not counting comments) lines of Ada which cannot be debugged yet because
the piece into which it plugs is not yet available.  I am _very_ glad to
be using Ada in this circumstance and able to make progress using only a
compiler.

> Of course there are always exceptions, where subtle interactions are best
> tracked down with a debugger,

Of particular significance in this area are the points where there is an
interface to code from others for which you do not have the source (such
as an operating system).  Ada programmers suffer in this area particularly
since such interfaces were usually not designed with Ada support as a top
priority and likewise for documentation.  The best answer even people on
this list seem to have for Microsoft situations is "you better know C".

Larry Kilgallen