On 04/30/10 09:24, Frank Schoenheit, Sun Microsystems Germany wrote:
Defensive programming, eh? Please don't. (Look up the arguments
against it in Bertrand Meyer's OO tome, for example. "Defensive
programming appears [...] to cover up for the lack of a systematic
approach by blindly putting in as many checks as possible, furthering
the problem of reliability rather than addressing it seriously.")
Having seen a lot of nasty bugs and crashes which would have been
prevented by some more defensive programming, I continue to think that
defensiveness has its justification sometimes. (As always, using your
brain is a good idea, admittedly.)
Working around errors in the program logic, by continuing in specific
ways (continue, break, ...) from a point where it is detected that such
an error manifested itself (assert) may sometimes "happen to work," but
in the end only masks the latent errors and makes the code unnecessarily
complex.
("Defensive programming" probably has various connotations. Note that I
am not arguing against a programming style that properly takes care of
all the "unusual" states a program can legitimately get into. For me,
that's not "defensive" programming but just plain normal programming.)
If you use those macros not to assert logic errors, but rather to flag
"unusual program states," I would prefer if you used something more
appropriate than OSL_ENSURE/OSL_ASSERT for that (say, OSL_TRACE),
especially in new code. Remember that
<http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=109142> "Let assertions
abort" will at one point force use to check all uses of OSL_ASSERT etc.
to sort out those that assert logic errors vs. those that merely flag
"unusual program states."
Apart from that, macros that hide control flow are IMO nasty. Is the
savings gained by
ENUSRE_OR_CONTINUE(...)
vs.
OSL_ENSURE(...);
continue;
really worth the trouble?
-Stephan
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