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: 103376,34872f3f22b5b140 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-11-10 12:32:17 PST Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!nycmny1-snh1.gtei.net!news.gtei.net!news-out.visi.com!hermes.visi.com!uunet!ash.uu.net!world!news From: Robert A Duff Subject: Re: Suggestion for gnatstub User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2 Sender: news@world.std.com (Mr Usenet Himself) Message-ID: Date: Sun, 10 Nov 2002 20:31:52 GMT Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii References: <3dcb9e51$0$303$bed64819@news.gradwell.net> <3DCBC4C9.AD436CD9@earthlink.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: shell01.theworld.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:30690 Date: 2002-11-10T20:31:52+00:00 List-Id: "Marin David Condic" 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