Roy Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > greg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Paul Rubin wrote: > > > E.g. your program might pass its test and run properly for years > > > before some weird piece of input data causes some regexp to not quite > > > work. > > > > Then you get a bug report, you fix it, and you add a test > > for it so that particular bug can't happen again. > > The TDD zealots would tell you you've got the order wrong. Instead of > "fix, then write a test", it should be "write a failing test, then fix it".
Incidentally, I was pretty surprised recently (re-reading Weinberg's "Psychology of Computer Programming" classic from _1971_) to find out Weinberg advocating "test-first coding" (not the same thing as "test-driven design", but sharing the key insight that tests should be written before the code they test) for psychological reasons. He's discussing common practices of the '60s, with the same professional writing both the code and the tests, and pointing out how often the knowledge of the already-written code subconsciously influences the programmer to write tests that don't really "challenge" the code enough -- writing the tests "in advance" would avoid this problem. Nihil sub sole novi... Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
