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From: Ted Velkoff <velkoff@erols.com>
Subject: Re: Safety-critical development in Ada and Eiffel
Date: 1997/08/18
Message-ID: <33F7D014.70B5@erols.com>#1/1
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Newsgroups: comp.object,comp.software-eng,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.eiffel
Date: 1997-08-18T00:00:00+00:00
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Ken Garlington wrote:
> 
> Ted Velkoff wrote:
> > To begin with, by "_always_ turned off", I assume what is meant is
> > "turned off during execution of a delivered system", not "turned off
> > during execution of a delivered system and during its entire development
> > phase".[...]
> 
> Not how the original argument was phrased. However if you want to argue
> the merits of turning them on during development and then off for
> released
> code, see section 3.2.2 of
> 
>   http://www.flash.net/~kennieg/ariane.html
> 
> for my rebuttal.
> 

All the points made in section 3.2.2 are valid (meeting deadlines, 
issues in regression testing, limits to development resources).  But is 
it really never appropriate to monitor assertions at any time in the 
development life-cycle?

Forget about Eiffel for a moment, and consider Ada.  I'm starting to 
think that the approach being advocated would suggest using "pragma 
Supress" throughout the entire development cycle, starting with unit 
test.  Without ever having tried to do things that way, it seems on the 
surface that it would be harder to detect and correct bugs in the early 
going.  Isn't there some amount of run-time checking that is appropriate 
during development even if it is turned off later?

-- Ted Velkoff