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Old 10th Apr 2019, 22:25
  #3841 (permalink)  
Water pilot
 
Join Date: Mar 2015
Location: Washington state
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Coding these days rarely has errors as there are many tools that can be used to verify the code it will also validate correctly as the code does just want the designer erroneously asked it to do.
You just made me spit out my coffee! I think we must work in vastly different parts of the industry.

As a side and possibly interesting technical note, it is not possible to prove even that a given program will terminate given a specific input, that is one of the early theorems in computer theory, dating back to before computers actually existed. Sometime in college I had a course on proving programs correct; the text was a medium sized book that as I recall spent many chapters proving that a simple algorithm for floating point division was correct. Having already worked for a scientific company (and having found a bug in their floating point libraries) and being a better programmer than theoretician I did the obvious thing and implemented the pseudo code -- and promptly found that pseudo code which had been proven correct in several different ways actually produced the incorrect answer in many common cases! The frustrating part was that although I could easily see why the code was wrong, I was never really able to figure out why the proof that it was correct was wrong. My much smarter friend who was just as crazy as I independently did the same thing and she got the same conclusion. She actually worked for Boeing back in the day.
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