Ada policy

[Mike Stump]

On Aug 30, 2004, at 4:03 PM, Richard Kenner wrote:
> As Robert said, there will be lots of situations where the choice is 
> either
> to submit the fix without a test case or not submit the fix.  Which do
> you think is the best approach?

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.

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.  
:-)