About the Expressiveness of D

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, April 03, 2013 12:03:39 Walter Bright wrote:
> On 4/3/2013 11:56 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > Certainly, I agree that having the minimal tests required to test
> > everything that needs testing should be the goal, but figuring out which
> > tests are and aren't really needed is a bit of art.
> 
> That's why we are engineers, and not mere code monkeys.

True.

> > Actually, I'd argue that in perfect world, you'd test absolutely every
> > possible input to make sure that it had the correct output, but that's
> > obviously impossible in all but the most simplistic code,
> 
> We can exploit mathematics to reduce the test cases while testing
> thoroughly. In physics I learned to test one's solution with the boundary
> cases and a couple of known cases. Mathematically, that was sufficient.

Definitely, though in some cases, figuring the bounds cases can be quite tricky 
- e.g. as thorough as std.datetime's unit tests are, I still missed some in 
one instance and got a bug report early on for that (though on the whole, 
there have been very few bugs reported on std.datetime, so I think that the 
unit tests have been quite effective). But getting good at figuring that sort of 
thing out _is_ part of our job description.

- Jonathan M Davis