Derek Elkins wrote:
On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 02:18 +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote: ...
It isn't something that would throw a C programmer off, but it is something that could confuse a pure Haskell programmer. And the only way I could be sure of radians versus degrees was by trying it out, not a great strategy for determining the implementation of functions!
Uh, why not? Often that's exactly what I do as checking even conveniently located documentation is more time consuming than just trying it.
I agree, but at the risk of veering uncharacteristically off-topic for haskell-cafe, I think it's an interesting example of the degree of assurance about correctness we're willing to accept in practice, in real development. We discover a function called, say, "cos", probably by guessing it's name, run a very small number of simple tests on it, see the answers we expect, and decide that it's the function we want. Does anyone want to defend that on safety/correctness grounds? But some of us do it anyway. (I'll have to work this into the upcoming paper I mentioned, "In defense of arbitrary untracked effects in high assurance software." I'm glad Graham Fawcett volunteered to co-author!)