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I would think that unit tests have nothing to do with Dijsktra's notion of verification. I even seem to recall he had a horror of software testing. If you can p
by gruseom 15y ago
I would think that unit tests have nothing to do with Dijsktra's notion of verification. I even seem to recall he had a horror of software testing. If you can prove something, why test it?
- akkartik 15y agoHis opinion on tests: they can only show the presence of bugs, not their absence.
- Confusion 15y agoThat statement means: "they can only show the presence of 0 or more bugs, not the absence of any bugs". That's not just his opinion: that's a fact.
- DennisP 15y agoI recently read the free Kindle chapter of David Gries' book The Science of Programming, recommended at a previous discussion of this essay: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1667081 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1667081 My impression of his thesis so far: unit tests are great, but the challenge is figuring out exactly what unit tests you need to write. Formal methods give you a way of doing that.