Your procedure above is more akin to scientific induction than mathematical induction.
I am sorry if I wasn't clear, but I am not talking about doing mathematical induction, but more structural induction. Which is a more generalized version of mathematical induction. Which to my understanding says that to prove P(x) you must test P with both a empty and non-empty value of x.
Which is fine, but it isn't really a formal method in that you are not proving anything, just building evidence that code seems to work.
I am not hoping it to be a truely formal method, but more a basis to build good unit tests off of. It seems to me that testing arbitrary data against manually calculated results (which is commonly how people built unit tests), is not as good as some kind of (possibly) provable statement which can be translated into a unit test.
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|
