Re: Suggestion for gnatstub

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

"Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org> writes:

> In the world I live in, it would not be possible to leave stubs in a
> delivered system, so I'm not worried about that. Ultimately, if you do worry
> about such things, there's nothing to stop hand-generated stubs or bad
> subroutines or any other sort of trash from getting through, so why worry
> about a machine generated stub? And besides, what about procedures with only
> a "null ;" statement? That's sort of an envisioned use - test stubs - so
> maybe they should have been disallowed by the language?

To me, "null;" means "this procedure does nothing".  You're suggesting
to overload it to also mean "I haven't gotten around to writing this
procedure yet".

> As to the value? I've often had a higher level procedure where I want to
> check the logical flow or correctness in some "grand overview" sense without
> worrying so much that it got the right answer to anything.

I don't normally use that style, because when the thing crashes, you
have to expend energy debugging whether it's a "real" bug (in the grand
overview code) versus a "stub" that is generating bogus data, and then
the grand code is tripping over it.

> As a switch selectable choice, if you don't consider such a thing to be
> "safe" you don't have to use it. For those who would find it useful and
> aren't concerned about potential safety issues, well, there it is!

Hmm.  If I'm *using* the program *you* write, I just hope the reason you
"aren't concerned about potential safety issues" is that you've solved
them some other way.  Too many programmers "aren't concerned ..." due to
sloppiness.  ;-)

Having said all that, I admit none of this is a big deal.

- Bob