In article <5i9o1b$ght@news.istar.ca>,
Hume Smith <hclsmith@tallships.istar.ca> wrote:
>In article <01bc42ae$4fc84940$6b91aac6@odessa.bmc.com>, msterin@bmc.com says...
>
>>Jack Jansen <jack@cwi.nl> wrote in article <jack.860328432@news.cwi.nl>...
>>> ...
>>> ...With languages like Python or Tcl, with
>>> no interface definitions whatsoever, you can only *hope* that you use
>>> every interface correctly. I work on a largish project in Python, and
>>> the one thing that gives continuous headaches is the lack of interface
>>> definitions. Whenever you change an interface it is very very
>>> difficult to check that you haven't inadvertantly broken something.
>>
>>This what the regression testing is for, isn't it ?
>
>if by regression testing you mean running it over and over and hoping someone
>spots something going wrong - no.
.
[sad cautionary tale]
.
.
Now I'm curious; what *did* Mr. Jansen have in mind?
Was he saying that a language which enforces strict
(static?) typing promotes fewer mishaps in using
interfaces? By "interface definition", did he mean
something beyond the syntactic? Certainly there's a
lot of mayhem going on in typical developments just
at the syntactic level, and so improvement there is
significant, but I don't know whether that was all
that was intended. Is Eiffel the model for defini-
tions which are "as good as they get"?
I've sent a copy of this to Mr. Jansen. I've left
follow-ups alone, although I invite others to prune
them.
--
Cameron Laird http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html
claird@NeoSoft.com +1 713 623 8000 #227
+1 713 996 8546 FAX
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