From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,b30bd69fa8f63cb2 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-06-13 05:22:21 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!headwall.stanford.edu!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!62.173.119.178!not-for-mail From: Peter Amey Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: C bug of the day Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 13:21:55 +0100 Message-ID: <3EE9C1E3.8050908@praxis-cs.co.uk> References: <1054751321.434656@master.nyc.kbcfp.com> <82347202.0306101232.16776a81@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 62.173.119.178 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: fu-berlin.de 1055506742 19130285 62.173.119.178 (16 [69815]) User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:39099 Date: 2003-06-13T13:21:55+01:00 List-Id: AG wrote: > wrote in message > news:d6652001.0306120439.75bdfe78@posting.google.com... > > >>Obviously, you concentrate on the most important problems first:-). >>Good luck. (I rather doubt that a language can be both safe and >>popular. History, at any rate, is against you.) > > > Mind if I try to take it on a bit of a tangent? > > Why do you think the things like TDD and > unit-testing are getting so much attention > lately? Could it (possibly) be that they > just try to fill-in the role that a safe > language would do as a matter of course? > > Sort of trying to compensate for > deficiencies of a language with some > home-grown solutions? > That certainly fits with our experience using SPARK (SPARK takes the principle of early error detection even further than Ada). On SPARK projects we have found unit test to be of little or no value since the kinds of errors it typically find do not typically occur in SPARK programs. Requirements-based testing of the complete system is a different story; that is always worthwhile. See "Is Proof More Cost-effective than Testing" on www.sparkada.com for some background on this. Peter