Fwd: [Haskell-cafe] Data.Tree.Zipper in the standard libraries

[Aaron Denney]

On 2008-05-31, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> It's not wasted work. As far as I know, only Ian advocates against
> including tests.
>
> Having worked on several data structure libraries, I've found that
> QuickCheck regularly catches errors that appear, and ensure over the
> long term that code remains stable.

Ian does have a point that there is a lot of wasted effort.  Perhaps the
flow can be optimized so that these tests aren't run as often.

One would get nearly the same benefit if they're only run right before
major distribution, to keep buggy versions from widespread usage.  Then,
the patch that caused the bug can easily be tracked down by bisection.

Even if they're never run automatically on every change, they're a
valuable bit of documentation: they're an unambiguous machine-readable
specification of several properties that are expected to hold.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-