Unofficial wish list status.(Jul 2008)

[Sean Kelly]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>> Yep.  Thanks for sharing your experience.  I'm a researcher, so while 
>> I've been at this for coding thing for 20 years too, I don't tend to 
>> play around with a lot of million-line code bases written by 
>> million-monkey junior programmers.  I did do a short stint for a big, 
>> well-known software company once, and got my taste of million-monkey 
>> code, though.  Scary stuff.  They wanted me to modify some crufty 
>> parser to do some new tricks when there were absolutely no unit tests 
>> or example programs or even documentation to show me what it was 
>> supposed to be doing in the first place.  I'm amazed now that they 
>> didn't tell me to "figure out this mess and document it first, writes 
>> some unit tests, then add feature X" but instead they just wanted me 
>> to jump right in and throw more gasoline into the fire.  Yikes.
> 
> Microsoft once asked me why I didn't update the MFC library that comes 
> with DMC++. I said the problem was that MFC is a large complex system 
> with not a single test case for it (at least one that is available to 
> me). The existing one was tested heavily by others, and I know it works.
> 
> If I recompile a new version, I have NO idea whether it compiled 
> correctly or not. It took about a year to squeeze all the bugs out of 
> the existing one.
> 
> STLport is different, because that comes with a test suite. I can 
> recompile it, run the test suite, and I know it works.

To be fair, you know the features that the test cover work :-)  But the 
point remains.  With this in mind, why does contract checking still not 
support inheritance as described in the spec?  Contracts are one feature 
that originally drew me to D and it's a shame that they're only half 
implemented.


Sean