RE: [xml-dev] RE: Avoid Case Analyses

[David Lee <dlee@calldei.com>]

As another data point.  "Use Cases" (maybe not the same as "Case Analysis" ?)
is the primary methodology that Agile development advocates as opposed to the evil useless time consuming wasteful practice of writing specifications ... 

Not a great fan of Agile ... but did live through it ... it has its benifits.


----------------------------------------
David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org

-----Original Message-----
From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan@ccil.org] On Behalf Of John Cowan
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2012 1:38 PM
To: Costello, Roger L.
Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] RE: Avoid Case Analyses

Costello, Roger L. scripsit:

>     Case analyses is essentially using examples to define a function (or
>      in the case of a specification to specify a behavior).

"Examples" usually means just a subset of the possible cases, whereas
"case analysis" involves specifying how to handle _every_ case.
Conflating them just produces confusion.

> "Programs that avoid case analyses are clearer and simpler than those
> that use case analyses."
> 
> Professor Richard Bird made that surprising statement in his book,
> Introduction to Functional Programming.

I can't find it using Amazon search within the book.  However, I think the
sense of "case analysis" in that book opposes it to "pattern matching",
which is a distinction that is only relevant to specific programming
languages that provide pattern matching.  The underlying implementation
is by an exhaustive set of cases anyway.

-- 
Even a refrigerator can conform to the XML      John Cowan
Infoset, as long as it has a door sticker       cowan@ccil.org
saying "No information items inside".           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --Eve Maler

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