Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ncar!noao!arizona!dave From: dave@cs.arizona.edu (Dave P. Schaumann) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng Subject: Re: Tolerance (was Re: Reusability considered harmful??(!!)) Message-ID: <777@caslon.cs.arizona.edu> Date: 4 Feb 91 01:03:41 GMT References: <1401@ucl-cs.uucp> <27A9B451.48BF@tct.uucp> <15863.27ad36b6@levels.sait.edu.au> Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson Lines: 32 According to G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly): GJ: Can the tolerance idea get off the starting blocks? In article <27A9B451.48BF@tct.uucp>, chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes: CS: "The strlen() function returns the number of characters in the CS: given string, plus or minus two." CS: Right. In article <15863.27ad36b6@levels.sait.edu.au> xtbjh@levels.sait.edu.au writes: BH: Sorry, can't let this opportunity pass... BH: How long does your favourite system take to find the answer at this level BH: of precision? How much variance in the time can you tolerate? What BH: resources are you willing to trade for a higher-accuracy result? BH: (This is of course a variant of the comment that "correctness is not an BH: absolute in an engineering domain" that I posted earlier.) BH: For me, I think the notion of tolerance is a good one, and is already BH: implicit in many areas of software. I'd certainly be interested in hearing a discussion on this topic (tolerance implicit in software). Numerical analysis aside, I can't imagine a single instance of "close is good enough". CS: Chip Salzenberg at Teltronics/TCT