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On Tue, 2004-01-06 at 15:04, Ian Graham wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Jan 2004, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>
> > igraham@ic-unix.ic.utoronto.ca (Ian Graham) writes:
> ...
> > >No one wants to have they app crash for lack of handling some obscure
> > >content model -- and I've certainly seen that happen a lot on the
> > >project I'm working on.
> >
> > Then write the apps so they don't crash when fed something they don't
> > understand. Responding with "I don't understand this" is a good first
> > step.
> >
> > >We need to make sure people use the 'right' approaches for processing
> > >xml, so this doesn't happen. Unfortunately this is a different mindset
> > >for designers and developers ...
> >
> > What would this "right" approach be? The semantic straitjacket?
>
> Of course not (this is getting silly). I'm merely pointing out that
> getting developers to do things 'right' means teaching them to think about
> their interfaces (namely xml) in new, different ways. That's hard to do,
> particularly when many of the tools (like much of the web services stuff
> we're working with) don't support anything but the straitjacket. [last
> sentence may be tainted by recent experience :-( ]
>
> Which is way off topic from complexity and formalism (at least as I
> interpreted it), but is interesting nevertheless.
it's not way off topic - predicate calculus would have programmers much
more careful about these things - maybe it's time for a dummy's guide to
"a discipline of programming"
when you can break systems down to pre conditions, post conditions,
transfer functions, and the algorithms that implement them you can go a
long way towards reliable systems and specs.
it's not fool proof but it does get you a long way towards understanding
how well you know the problem and what questions you need to ask.
perhaps it's time to blow the dust of my old design notes and publish
them more formally
rick
>
> Ian
>
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