On Sep 12, 2008, at 5:13 PM, Robert Cummings wrote:
On Fri, 2008-09-12 at 16:51 -0400, Eric Gorr wrote:
On Sep 12, 2008, at 4:27 PM, Robert Cummings wrote:
On Fri, 2008-09-12 at 16:11 -0400, Eric Gorr wrote:
On Sep 12, 2008, at 3:44 PM, Robert Cummings wrote:
I don't see how that in any way makes an argument for or against.
Once
still must spend client's money wasting time on code that has
questionable merit. Yes, some debugging code is a great boon in
any
application, but littered everywhere to fulfill someone's
subjective
philosophical ideal when sometimes it's just plain unnecessary...
wasteful IMHO.
As far as I know, no one has yet come up with a proof showing when
debugging code is and/or is not necessary.
The simple fact is that bugs can popup anywhere and spending a
client's time and money by spending a few minutes writing all of
the
simple test cases throughout an application can be well worth it as
it
can save far more of the client's time and money by not wasting
it on
tracking down bugs that could have been easily caught.
It is impractical to include debugging code for every conditional
in a
program.
I have yet to see any evidence that it is impractical, especially
after one has gotten into the habit. After all, for switch
statements,
adding in a default case takes mere seconds.
Yes but if you do for case, you SHOULD do for if/else if/else which is
an analagous approach.
Doubly impractical to do so in PHP unless you have some way to
prevent said debugging code from running in production.
It isn't hard to prevent a code path from running in a production
environment and allowing it to run in a development environment. Just
one example, in PHP, would be globally defining something like
PRODUCTION and then testing to see if it has a value of 1 or 0 and
then writing an if statement to test the value before executing some
code.
There you go... you just ran a useless branch. Replacing one code path
with another is hardly an optimial solution. What if your case
statement
is in a tight loop that runs a million times?
How could that possibly matter since the code is never supposed to be
executed to begin with and if it is executed it would immediately
imply there is a bug?
Furthermore, the whole point of these test cases is for those parts
of
the code which are never supposed to be executed to begin with, so
that alone will aid in preventing said debugging code from executing
in production...and if said debugging code does run in production,
would that be such a bad thing (assuming it doesn't interfere with
the
user)? After all, because it (like the default switch case) was
executed, it immediately implies there was a problem...
If they're never supposed ot be executed then why are you adding extra
code? That sounds like a need for better logic skills, not a need for
debugging code.
Because, it is never supposed to be ... not never will be. Bug's cause
all kind of things to happen...including code paths that aren't
supposed to happen.
I doubt any client would believe it a good thing that a bug that
should have been caught in development wasn't caught until production
because mere minutes weren't spent putting in debug code that would
have caught these bugs.
Maybe you're
confusing debugging code with unit tests. As I said earlier, it is
far
more practical to do so for complex conditions where a reader might
easily get lost. Rather useless for simplistic cases.
Until one finds it has saved hours because a problem was caught, I
can
understand why some would think that it is rather useless.
I've spent hours on bugs before, they were never once related to not
having put debugging fluff into a simple set of case statements. They
were almost always related to lack of comments in a complex or hackish
chunk of code.
Great. I hope that continues.
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