[TIP] Model checking Python code

Ned Batchelder ned at nedbatchelder.com
Sat Sep 5 05:17:02 PDT 2009



Matt Harrison wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Mark Seaborn<mrs at mythic-beasts.com> wrote:
> snip, snip
>   
>> If there are multiple choices to be made, the multiplying out (to give
>> the Cartesian product) is done by the check runner, which is performing
>> a kind of inversion of control.
>>
>> I'd be interested to hear if anyone has used this kind of technique in
>> Python before, or if anyone thinks it would help solve problems
>> they've encountered before.
>>
>>     
>
> Mark -
>
> I read your blog post this sounds interesting.  In fact I gave a talk
> about a related subject two years ago at pycon[0].  I covered
> cyclomatic complexity, code coverage and how they relate.  The problem
> is that Python currently only supports line coverage, which by itself
> is not sufficient to support more advanced tools.
>
> <rant>
> When you take the people who care about testing, and take the subset
> that care about coverage, and take the subset that care about
> path/model checking, I think that you get a really small percentage of
> developers.
>   
Count me in the (small) subset.  I still intend to get this working.  
Can someone come to work and do my real job so I have some time? :)
> Any tool which wants to increase the size of these smaller subsets of
> programmers is going to have to be:
>
>   * Very easy to use
>   * Provide some utility
>
> I need to market, work on pycoverage.el more (which is an even smaller
> subset of the above that use emacs), because I think it lies along the
> path of where you want to go.
>
> I guess my point is that there are people who find this cool, so don't give up!
> </rant>
>
> What I'd like is a way to tell which of the paths I've covered from
> the basis paths. (from linear algebra, once you cover the basis paths,
> other paths are just linear combinations of them).  (I even messed
> around with the CPython eval loop trying to get more fine grained
> tracing, but real life caught up with me and I moved on).
>
>   
I'm still confused by the term "linear combinations of paths". What 
would a non-linear combination of them be?  Why don't people just say, 
"combinations of paths"?
> I'm interested in seeing where your project goes.  Keep us posted.
>
> cheers,
> -matt
>
> 0 - http://panela.blog-city.com/pycon_2008_managing_complexity_slides.htm
>   
--Ned.

-- 
Ned Batchelder, http://nedbatchelder.com

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