Subj : Re: Rollback Functions
To   : comp.programming
From : Phlip
Date : Wed Oct 12 2005 02:59 pm

Dave wrote:

> Switching to a different language won't stop bugs happening.  A company I 
> worked for a few years ago analysed a project at the end of its 
> development cycle that was written half in C and half in Ada.  The study 
> revealed NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE in the number and complexity of bugs in 
> the C and Ada halves.

That is a nice indictment of Ada's mission statement of "perfect bug-free 
code by spanking developers over every statement".

I suspect, in this situation, the code from both languages endured the same 
product lifecycle, that the developers did not specialize in one language, 
and that they followed a "sane subset" of C that permitted the language's 
feeble typechecking systems to check enough types to make each clean compile 
significant.

> Some debuggers already implement rollback; not Visual Studio, 
> unfortunately, afaik.  It could sometimes really help when stepping 
> through stuff to be able to back up a few steps and rerun them, and the 
> only way of doing that at present is to set a breakpoint back a bit, then 
> restart the debug, which is tedious.

If restarting the debug is tedious, then you have bigger problems than a 
poor debugger.

I restart a debug by putting a breakpoint in a test case and hitting the 
test button again. Because test cases should cohere closely to their tested 
code, the buggy area should only be a few calls away. (This is a legacy 
situation with tests written last.)

-- 
  Phlip
  http://www.greencheese.org/ZeekLand  <-- NOT a blog!!!

.