First an analogy:
when first small scale integrated circuits came on the market
experimenters built digital circuits by busking since they didn't
yet know how to 'read the score'. One used an intuitive
designing method to chose various combinations and
configuratins of gates to acheive the desired result.
Later, simple tools like Karnaugh maps and equations to
get cannonical forms ...etc. were use to replace the art
with some science.
--------
It seems to me that the pre & post conditions advocated
eg. by Eiffel provide a type of weak formal method for
software design ?
Occasionally, like now, I want to write a small routine to:
FOR StartLine TO EndLine DO
RemoveMultipleConsecutiveSpaces;
I.e. remove the extra spaces -- which I remember WS
could insert for text to fill the line nicely.
I'm too old & tired to fire up the attention and concentration
to do this without many iterations, and expect to just
modify a sample out of a library of examples.
Idealy such a library of example sources would include the
pre & post conditions like Eiffel or Oberon.
Q - are there online lists of examples for such trivial tasks,
perhaps eg. as part of Eiffel tutors ?
Thanks for any feedback,
== Chris Glur.
