Re: Teaching new tricks to an old dog (C++ -->Ada)

From: Randy Brukardt (randy_at_rrsoftware.com)
Date: 03/18/05 

Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2005 17:15:40 -0600

"Jerry Coffin" <jcoffin@taeus.com> wrote in message
news:1111085060.475613.176310@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
...
> The question is the degree to which that situation holds here. Thus
> far, you've provided essentially nothing in the way of independent
> corroboration of any of your statements at all. You make a statement
> here, and then offer your own statement on your own web site as the
> "corroborating evidence."

I can't imagine what sort of "independent corroboration" would satisfy you
(or why it matters, for that matter). I've already pointed you at the ISO
standard and the WG9 web site. Pretty much all of the other material on
testing was written by me. There's nothing sinister about that: I'm the only
one that is paid here, and thus I end up writing it. Of course, the
volunteer review board reviewed and approved that material. But even if that
was done publically, it wouldn't satisfy you, because *I* the webmaster of
the site and therefore would have probably formatted and posted the
material. Our budget isn't large enough to have multiple people doing
overlapping jobs just to prove some sort of independence.

Our way of proving relability is to conduct the entire process in public.
Thus, the procedures, test reports, and test suite are all publically
available. And I insist that these have enough information in them so that
any member of the public can reproduce the testing. (This isn't like the
destructive testing of ICs that only a few specialists can run -- anyone who
knows how to run a compiler can run the tests on it; and they had better get
the same results.) That means that any fault in the process can be exposed,
and that should provide a strong incentive to avoid bending the rules.

If that is not good enough for you, then there is nothing else I can say.
Personally, I would trust an open process over one that is not open, not
matter how independent the latter is. After all, the supposedly independent
government run process was cheated several times; because the reports
weren't readily available to the public, there was little chance that those
would be detected.

                               Randy.