int/long unification hides bugs

[kartik]

Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote in message news:<Z6kfd.18413$SW3.4432 at fed1read01>...
> kartik wrote:
> 
> > Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote in message news:<_aadnTCr7PWKYeHcRVn-rg at powergate.ca>...
> >  
> > 
> >>Do you feel strongly enough about the quality of your code to write
> >>automated tests for it?  Or are you just hoping that one tiny class
> >>of potential bugs will be caught for you by this feature of the
> >>language?
> > 
> > 
> > 1)catching overflow bugs in the language itself frees u from writing
> > overflow tests.
> 
> That seems to me to be a bit like saying you don't need to do any 
> engineering calculations for your bridge because you'll find out if it's 
> not strong enough when it falls down.

i was inaccurate. what i meant was that overflow errors provide a
certain amount of sanity checking in the absence of explicit testing -
& do u check every assignment for bounds?

> > 2)no test (or test suite) can catch all errors, so language support 4
> > error detection is welcome.
> 
> Yes, but you appear to feel that an arbitrary limit on the size of 
> integers will be helpful [...] Relying on hardware overflows as error 
> detection is pretty poor, really.

i'm not relying on overflow errors to ensure correctness. it's only a
mechanism that sometimes catches bugs - & that's valuable.

> > 3)overflow detection helps when u dont have automated tests 4 a
> > particular part of your program.
> > 
>  But writing such tests would help much more.

agreed, but do u test your code so thoroughly that u can guarantee
your code is bug-free. till then, overflow errors help.

-kartik