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Re: Formalism and complexity

• To: XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Formalism and complexity
• From: Nicolas Toper <ntoper@j...>
• Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2004 10:42:45 +0100
• Organization: Jouve
• Reply-to: ntoper@j...
• User-agent: KMail/1.4.1

You cannot always break every systems down to pre conditions, post conditions
and transfer functions.

Besides, this won't make your program not crash.

I believe the point was here (and I might say as usual): complex systems are
less likely to fail so how can we make easily complex system and where XML is
a help for that. Am I right?

Nicolas

long way towards reliable systems an

Le Mardi 06 Janvier 2004 10:31, Rick Marshall a écrit :
> On Tue, 2004-01-06 at 15:04, Ian Graham wrote:
> > On Mon, 5 Jan 2004, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> > > igraham@i... (Ian Graham) writes:
> >
> > ...
> >
> > > >No one wants to have they app crash for lack of handling some obscure
> > > >content model -- and I've certainly seen that happen a lot on the
> > > >project I'm working on.
> > >
> > > Then write the apps so they don't crash when fed something they don't
> > > understand.  Responding with "I don't understand this" is a good first
> > > step.
> > >
> > > >We need to make sure people use the 'right' approaches for processing
> > > >xml, so this doesn't happen. Unfortunately this is a different mindset
> > > >for designers and developers ...
> > >
> > > What would this "right" approach be?  The semantic straitjacket?
> >
> > Of course not (this is getting silly). I'm merely pointing out that
> > getting developers to do things 'right' means teaching them to think
> > about their interfaces (namely xml) in new, different ways.  That's hard
> > to do, particularly when many of the tools (like much of the web services
> > stuff we're working with) don't support anything but the straitjacket.
> > [last sentence may be tainted by recent experience :-( ]
> >
> > Which is way off topic from complexity and formalism (at least as I
> > interpreted it), but is interesting nevertheless.
>
> it's not way off topic - predicate calculus would have programmers much
> more careful about these things - maybe it's time for a dummy's guide to
> "a discipline of programming"
>
> when you can break systems down to pre conditions, post conditions,
> transfer functions, and the algorithms that implement them you can go a
> long way towards reliable systems and specs.
>
> it's not fool proof but it does get you a long way towards understanding
> how well you know the problem and what questions you need to ask.
>
> perhaps it's time to blow the dust of my old design notes and publish
> them more formally
>
> rick
>
> > Ian
> >
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