From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.6 (2021-04-09) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.6 Path: eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!aioe.org!5WHqCw2XxjHb2npjM9GYbw.user.gioia.aioe.org.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Dmitry A. Kazakov" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada and software testing Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2021 18:41:28 +0200 Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Message-ID: References: <871r84cq4r.fsf@nightsong.com> <5bc2434a-6784-47d6-ba66-50edff4f80f0n@googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 5WHqCw2XxjHb2npjM9GYbw.user.gioia.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/78.11.0 Content-Language: en-US X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.9.2 Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:62376 List-Id: On 2021-07-12 18:14, Gautier write-only address wrote: > You can combine the power of fuzzing with the power of Ada's strong typing, implying standard Ada run-time checks (e.g. range checks), plus a compiler's own checks (e.g. GNAT's validity checks). Before the Dark Age of Computing, testing was not arbitrary. You knew things about your implementation and even, God forbid, foresaw some of them. E.g. if the implementation was "linear" (the case for all buffer overflow stuff) you would simply test the end points (extremes) and one point inside instead of wasting time on anything else. Of course, to make such considerations and techniques work, the programs needed to be designed very differently, which was one of the motivations behind Ada constrained subtypes, ranges etc. This is also one of the reasons why unbounded strings, dynamic memory allocation etc must be avoided as you leave some upper bounds undefined making lot of things non-testable. -- Regards, Dmitry A. Kazakov http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de