On 17 Jan 02 at 11:25, Pablo Manalastas wrote: > > proving correctness. Some parts of the program are never encountered > during debugging, even by the most careful testers. Isn't this the reason > why one of the manned American space missions exploded in mid-air? > Programming history is full of these cases of debugging failures.
Manned? You mean unmanned carrying a spy satellite... it was written in Fortran with the comma replace with a dot or something... FOR I = 1,10 became FORI=1.10 (by the way, as I recall, fortran does not recognize spaces?)... > no idea about how the program should go, and then think-and-type. > No brilliant piece of code was ever produced this way. Worse still, > some student just copy their classmates work and then do cosmetic > search-and-replace. Ahh... my technique to check is simply to ask the student what the routine does...most students who copied were not able to explain the code. > When Linus Torvalds was writing his terminal emulator program which > eventually lead to his Linux project, the first thing he did was not > to run to his PC and type away. He first posted a question on the > Internet, asking where he can find this particular RFC! Let us put > back thinking into our programming. Let us not put the burden of writing > a correct program to the debugger/tester. Let us write a program that > is correct in the first place, so that there is no need to debug it. Lucky for him, when I was doing my HP 2621/2622 terminal emulation program in 1986 on the Apple ][, I connected the terminal to another terminal to decode the function key codes, cursor and screen function codes etc.... Didn't have the manual for the terminal since it was donated (2nd hand) and didn't have access to internet.... _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
