logoalt Hacker News

Snuggly73last Thursday at 4:26 PM2 repliesview on HN

Test cases are great, but not a total solution. Can you write a test case for the add_numbers(a, b) function?


Replies

Snuggly73last Thursday at 4:42 PM

Well, for some reason it doesnt let me respond to the child comments :(

The problem (which should be obvious) is that with a/b real you cant construct an exhaustive input/output set. The test case can just prove the presence of a bug, but not its absence.

Another category of problems that you cant just test and have to prove is concurrency problems.

And so forth and so on.

minimaxirlast Thursday at 4:34 PM

Of course you can. You can write test cases for anything.

Even an add_numbers function can have bugs, e.g. you have to ensure the inputs are numbers. Most coding agents would catch this in loosely-typed languages.