Re: Working with incompetent adaists / unsafe typing war story

[Stephen Leake <stephe_on_the_web@toadmail.com>]

<adaworks@sbcglobal.net> writes:

> Someone recently encountered a problem with a package I wrote years
> ago that had a limited private type. It seems I had overlooked one
> possible requirement (method) for that type. The need for the method
> is rare but I should have anticipated it. No one ever encountered
> the problem before, as far as I know.

No package is ever perfect :).

> It took me five minutes to add a specification for that method and
> about as long to write an implementation for it in the package body.
> The algorithm was simple to implement, but did involve an if
> statement. Had programmers been able to write their own code for the
> functionality of this method, the probability of some of them
> getting it wrong was low, but still possible. In this case, the
> algorithm was testable in one place rather than scattered about.


That is why open source libraries are so valuable; we can fix problems
in the right place, instead of working around them.

-- 
-- Stephe