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Re: Ada policy
Mike Stump wrote:
Primary languages and platforms should have them, they come in handy
from time to time and help make the compiler more maintainable and help
ensure a certain quality standard. Do no harm is really more
interesting to a customer than a random bug fix that they don't hit, and
by far, most code doesn't hit most bugs, therefore the greater good is
to not fix the bug, if you can't also do the testcase to ensure that the
customer won't hit the bug again...
Now, this is controversial, to be sure... and I'm not sure what should
be required of other frontends... I'll abstain from that.
Of course in practice if the FSF version is kept very close to the
AdaCore GNAT Pro version (which is what we try to achieve), then we
run millions of lines of proprietary tests on every target every day,
so indirectly you get the benefit of these tests anyway. If the trees
diverge, then you lose this very valuable input.
On the other hand, if you never need to run the testsuite and never
break any bugs, then, doing the testsuite is a complete waste of time. :-)