Re: dealing with lower level programmers

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Mon, 20 Jul 2009 01:26:13 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<4e6c7c5b-c6af-4cf8-95b5-c89e1d7c00f2@o7g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>
On Jul 20, 7:00 am, Keith H Duggar <dug...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

Stuart Golodetz wrote:

James Kanze wrote:


So, it would be nice to explore real world examples. Knuth's
TeX was brought up as a counter example. However, people
other than Knuth found and reported (to Knuth) bugs in TeX. So
I don't know if TeX falls under James' definition of "correct"
or not, and if that 3rd party testing breaks "single
individual" or not.


The real question is: what do we mean by "correct"? There's a
very real sense that my statement is trivially correct: no
non-trivial program can be guaranteed 100% correct (without any
bugs), so obviously, no non-trivial program written by a single
person can be 100% correct. That's just game playing, like
Stuarts example of a program which does nothing, but the
question remains: how many bugs to we accept? And do we take
into consideration maintainability issues: how difficult is it
to correct the bugs once they are found? (With regards to TeX,
at least seven bugs have been found and fixed since version 3.0
was released. The source is around 40KLOC, so that's not a
particularly low bug rate.)

What I'd really be interesting in seeing is a real life example
of a real program written by a single person which is considered
correct, with a statement as to what is considered correct or
how it is known to be correct.

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