Re: XSL Theory

On Fri, 10 Mar 2000 19:05:01 -0000, you wrote:

>I suspect if you take the problem the other way round, and try to prove
>incorrectness, you will make a lot more progress. I would think there are a
>large number of cases where, given a schema to which the source document
>must conform, and a stylesheet, I can prove quite easily that the result
>will NOT always conform to a given result schema. That sounds like a
>worthwhile thing to do.

Proving that something is wrong is a perfectly reasonable thing to do,
and once you've proved that it is wrong, you just throw it away (or
fix it). But just because you haven't figured out a way to prove
something wrong doesn't meant that it is right, of course. And without
proof that it is right, you're back in the original situation--you
can't deploy the code with complete confidence.

I'm not saying that it is _necessary_ to have proof that a program is
correct, by the way. But that is what the original question was
asking. In practice, we normally use testing as a substitute for
rigorous proof.

-Steve Schafer


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