On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 01:20 pm, Rustom Mody wrote: >> so ultimately, it all comes down to testing anyway. > > All??
Ultimately, yes. It all comes down to testing. How else do you know that your program to flernge the widget *actually* flernges the widget or not? > There is a famous quote by Dijkstra: > «Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs» Correct. And as Knuth said: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." You cannot *prove* the absence of bugs in a large, complex program, because how do you know your proof is correct? Your automatic prover is a program, which will contain bugs. If you don't use an automatic prover, then how do you know you didn't make a mistake in your manual proof? Ultimately, any program beyond a certain level of complexity can only be *suspected* to be correct. > Or if you prefer things of a more ‘practical’ (so-called_ nature: > http://www.testingexcellence.com/reasons-automated-tests-fail-to-find-regression-bugs/ -- Steven “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
