Royal Pain

[Peter L. Peres]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 18, 2004 at 07:27:26AM -0400, James Knott wrote:
> > And of course, it's impossible to prove there are no bugs.  You can only
> > fail to find some.
>
> That is actually not true.  If you have a well defined specification of
> what the behaviour of each piece of the program must be for specific
> inputs, you can actually prove the behaviour of each part of the program
> correct.  This is in fact done at some software companies.  It is
> certainly a lot more work and costs more.  It requires proper bounds
> checks, and full coverage testing at the very least.

And that the *specification* be correct. But the specification is
elaborated by humans (and machines programmed by humans), so ... you can
say standard compliance is not perfection (can you see the gnu style
recursion in this statement ?).

Peter
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml