Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!munnari.oz.au!yoyo.aarnet.edu.au!sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au!levels!xtbjh From: xtbjh@levels.sait.edu.au Newsgroups: comp.software-eng Subject: Tolerance (was Re: Reusability considered harmful??(!!)) Message-ID: <15863.27ad36b6@levels.sait.edu.au> Date: 4 Feb 91 10:25:58 GMT References: <1401@ucl-cs.uucp> <27A9B451.48BF@tct.uucp> Organization: Sth Australian Inst of Technology Lines: 28 In article <27A9B451.48BF@tct.uucp>, chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes: > According to G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly): >>Can the tolerance idea get off the starting blocks? > > "The strlen() function returns the number of characters in the > given string, plus or minus two." > > Right. Sorry, can't let this opportunity pass... How long does your favourite system take to find the answer at this level of precision? How much variance in the time can you tolerate? What resources are you willing to trade for a higher-accuracy result? (This is of course a variant of the comment that "correctness is not an absolute in an engineering domain" that I posted earlier.) For me, I think the notion of tolerance is a good one, and is already implicit in many areas of software. > -- > Chip Salzenberg at Teltronics/TCT , > "I want to mention that my opinions whether real or not are MY opinions." > -- the inevitable William "Billy" Steinmetz -- Brenton Hoff (behoffski) xtbjh@levels.sait.edu.au Transponder Australia My opinions are mine (and they're really weird).