A work colleague circulated this interesting article about reducing software bugs by orders of magnitude: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/sep05/0905ext.html
Some methods they talk about include removing error prone and ambiguous expressions from their ADA based language Sparc - The example they give is on why they removed the increment operators x++, x-- . A bit of googling shows that they have, in the past mentioned Python in Job specs, but only as one of many languages. 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. In this sidebar to the main article: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/sep05/0905extsb1.html It seems that they use one equation from the Z notation model and add it as a comment to their main programming languages function definition as a comment, then have a means of automatically testing the comment against the function body. 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 :-) So, How do I get feedback from Praxis, Do they already read comp.lang.py? Cheers, Paddy. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
