Re: An attack on a mint

Bill Frantz <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lang.e.general
Message-ID <r02010500-1049-E2C95A3CEA4911DCB7FC0030658F0F64@[192.168.1.5]>
[email protected] (Kevin Reid) on Tuesday, March 4, 2008 wrote:

>There's another form of testing that might help more though:  
>Haskell's QuickCheck and its descendants. They check that an  
>arbitrary predicate is true for a randomly selected subset of all  
>possible inputs to it.
>
>Since the test cases are machine-generated, they are not limited to  
>the programmer's consideration of what needs to be tested. However,  
>they might well check many simple cases and miss the edge cases where  
>failures occur, since they ignore the structure of the algorithm  
>being tested.
>
>http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~rjmh/QuickCheck/

I have used random number driven test drivers for some testing in
the past. Random number testing has turned up problems which I
would not have found (until after the code went production) by
normal techniques. I like the technique.

Cheers - Bill

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