alt Hacker NewsYes? What do you think fuzzing, unit testing, integration testing is for? It's an empirical evaluation of correctness. Literally just try and see.
For actual correctness verification in the strong sense, you'd need to start from a specification written in a formal language so that it's machine checkable, which if I had to guess not even win.rar GmbH has.
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repelsteeltje • yesterday at 8:53 PM
I hope the developers of, say, the brakes in my car don't interpret 'software correctness' the way you do.
Added, later: hey you changed your comment, added a whole paragraph.
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You're being needlessly dismissive.
From a philosophical perspective, there's no way to know that any piece of software is truly correct without formal verification.
But in the present, non-philosophical context, it's obvious that what we mean is, colloquially, "how well-tested is this against a variety of edge-case files which the official winrar handles correctly? Is there a test suite, and how robust is it? Plenty of software that claims to be compatible with the rar format, doesn't actually successfully read all rar files."
It's also equally obvious, in the present context, that we would prefer these steps to have been taken by the author of the software before we install it and run it on our own computers and data. The parent commenter wasn't just asking about the software's correctness for the sake of academic curiosity.