Re: C++ fluency

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Thu, 7 May 2009 07:47:08 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<06beb03c-198d-423b-8855-4f911e784a42@n4g2000vba.googlegroups.com>
On May 6, 10:19 pm, Andy Champ <no....@nospam.invalid> wrote:

    [...]

Now this was a trivially small change, and I defy anyone to
write a quick test to find it. Whenever I've told this story
to a TDD guru I've been told that real time is different.
Well, IMHO it isn't. All I've got there is three independent
threads - the disc, the app, and the timer.


In general, anything which involves threads (for any reasonable
definition of threads) *is* different, with regards to testing.
It's very, very difficult, if not impossible, to test timing
considerations (behavior which depends on which thread gets
where first). (This is not to say you shouldn't test. There
are generally a lot of things which don't depend on such timing
considerations, and testing is still useful for them.)

Note that this also affects any non-linear algorithm whose set
of input values is too large to reasonably test. And machine
floating point is non linear.

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