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From: "Chad  R. Meiners" <chad.rmeiners@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Do people who use Ada also use ocaml or F#?
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2010 20:05:34 -0700 (PDT)
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Date: 2010-11-06T20:05:34-07:00
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On Nov 6, 1:22=A0pm, Stephen Leake <stephen_le...@stephe-leake.org>
wrote:
> Robert A Duff <bobd...@shell01.TheWorld.com> writes:
>
> > "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mail...@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
>
> >> How do you execute a generic body? Testable are generic instances.
>
> > =A0 =A0 You can't test a generic without instantiating it.
>
> > =A0 =A0 You can't test a procedure without calling it.
>
> > =A0 =A0 You can't test an abstract type without declaring
> > =A0 =A0 a concrete type, and some objects of that type.
>
> > What am I missing?
>
> To truly test a generic, you need to test with all possible
> instantiations.
>
> Or at least with a representative subset. If the generic parameters are
> well structured, it may be possible to show that a few instances are
> sufficient.
>
> That's much more effort than testing a single concrete procedure.
>
> It may be worth it, of course; I often use generics precisely to reduce
> testing burden.
>
> --
> -- Stephe

No, this really isn't the case.  When you write a generic you only
need to test it for the cases that you intend to use it.  When you
attempt to reuse the generic, however, you need to test and verify
that the code is appropriate for reuse.

To bring this back to the original question, this is almost a mantra
of FP.  You need to make sure you are using the function (generic)
correctly, or you need to modify the function (or generic).