Software bugs aren't inevitable

[Giles Brown]

Paddy wrote:
> I was wondering what Praxis thought of Python, and how good it would be
> if a Praxis engineer gave a critique of Python as a part of a flow for
> producing low bug-count software.

I used to work at Praxis about 4 years ago and Perl was their scripting
language of choice at that time as I recall :)

> This is rather like how doctest can check the test and expected result
> given in a doc-string against the implementation given in the function;
> indeed I wrote up such an example at work and circulated it amongst the
> resident perl mongers. - Gosh it fealt good :-)

I am probably a bit out of date with this and never used it in anger,
but there are basically two levels of annotation.

The first is data flow and is used to specify what variables affect
what.  That is, you may specify for a function that the resulting
variable z is affected by the values of variable x and y (thats the
basic idea, there is a bit more to it of course).  The toolset checks
that your code matches your annotations.  It relies on not having the
different names for the same variable (not something you can guarantee
in Python really :).

The next level of annotations is for proving your code matches a
specification in Z.  So your annotations are part of that proof and can
again be checked automatically.

>
> So, How do I get feedback from Praxis, Do they already read
> comp.lang.py?

Are there no email links on: http://www.praxis-his.com/sparkada/ ?

Hth,
Giles Brown


> 
> Cheers,  Paddy.