Re: Need Urgent Help
Gennaro Prota wrote:
On 23 Oct 2006 04:41:07 -0400, "kanze" <kanze@gabi-soft.fr> wrote:
Gennaro Prota wrote:
On 22 Oct 2006 13:03:02 -0400, "James Kanze" <james.kanze@gmail.com>
wrote:
but in general, a test should never fail. If it does, it means
that there is a weakness in your code review proceedure.
Just to set the record straight: there are some test programs
(typically for metaprogramming facilities) that must fail to compile,
and others (e.g. for a project/library-specific assert facility) that
must not execute successfully; in that case the test success is the
compilation/execution failure and vice versa (as long as one pays
attention to avoid any other reasonable cause of failure).
Success of a test is, of course, that whatever happens is what
is documented to happen. If it is documented that compilation
fails with an error, then that is success.
That's what I said. I just wanted to draw attention on the fact that
"success" as referred to a test or test case is not the same as
"success" as referred to compilation or execution.
Of course, unless we're doing something very wrong, that sort of
thing should only concern an infime minority of the programmers.
Hoping the French "infime" doesn't have the same nuance as the Italian
"infimo".
Oops. Roughly, infinitely small. Very, very few programmers
should be concerned with this sort of thing.
If we have more programmers developing meta-code than
programmers actually writing applications that use it, then
there's a real problem somewhere.
The situation is not limited to metacode.
So apply it to the more general phrase: if we have more
programmers developing general purpose libraries than
programmers actually writing applications that use them...
The point is that such things are tools, to make life easier for
the actual application programmer. And unless there are people
using the tools, developing them is a waste of time.
My libraries have that sort of tests everywhere.
Mine too. Except for templates, it's rare that I expect misuse
to fail at compile time, but I do make extensive use of asserts.
On the other hand, My test suite doesn't test them. Basically,
I use asserts to trap cases where the interface specification
says undefined behavior. Which means that the code doesn't
guarantee to assert.
--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
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