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Date:	Thu, 25 Jun 1998 00:12:49 PST8PDT
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: Re: SCOUG-Programming archive and FTP server project

Content Type: text/plain

Rollin White wrote:
>
> http://www.scoug.com/lists/programming/1998/index.html
>
> ... is two clicks off the main page ...

And another 50 clicks to read what's there. Next time you see Hethmon,
ask him for an option to put a month's worth of postings on one html
page. But I'm so-o-o dedicated, I read everything anyway.

On the ftp server, shouldn't we also be figuring out how we're going to
test the modules? I know you wrote it in a weekend, and I'm sure you
didn't do any major acceptance testing, but this _is_ a programming sig
and we're _supposed_ to at least _try_ to do things right ...

One of my favorite pastimes is figuring out how to break other people's
code. Somebody says "here, try this library" and I say, "I wonder if
they forgot I might do _this_". Kaboom.

I typically write a test routine that calls the module being tested.
The test routine receives the parameters that are to be passed on to the
the module being tested plus the expected result. When the module being
tested returns to the test routine, if the expected result isn't what's
really returned, I send a line to my log file.

Then I write 30 or 40 lines that call the test routine with every sneaky
set of parameters I can think of, to see what goes kaboom. Even my own
code sometimes goes kaboom. That's why I get bent out of shape when
coders aren't careful ... like not bothering to figure out what to do
about a possible backspace in an input string.

So what's the block diagram here, and are we going to create some test
modules? That virtual file system we discussed last Saturday is ripe
for a few bugs unless we test things like the path parser.

- Peter Skye

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