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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: any more pros for nana?
From:       Mirko Sucker <mirko.sucker () unibw-hamburg ! de>
Date:       2000-01-25 22:02:02
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Stephan Kulow wrote:
> I'm sorry for the work that Mirko put into integrating
> it and Phil to fullfill our constrains, but I see no
> reason to confuse developers by having two debug solutions
> and kdebug is surely the one that fits better into the
> KDE framework.

It was much less work than the CORBA experiment.

But there is one more pro:
I think, it will take some time until more people get used to this
approach. And definitly, it is a better idea to check whether your
assumptions are fulfilled than to hope they will. Finding the
hard-to-find bugs is easier with it. 
Sure, it makes no sense to use it "widely" in 500-loc-applications, but
in larger projects invariants, for example,  become inevitable.
So, the main pro is: If you are used to it, you will write better code,
and bad sideeffects and logical errors will force you to erase them,
since even wrong but non-critical states of your application are found
and kill the program by an assertion. And you will know what happened.
Approaches like programming per contract mainly create better
programmers (from the average programmer, not David :-), not better
code. 

I tried to erase all problems with other compilers. Currently, KDE
should compile with compilers different from gcc, at least I got no
messages against it. The only problems are ugly header names and
compilers warnings. Both should be solveable. 

On the other hand, if I am the only one opting for it (I am the only one
using it, but this may be a matter of time), it is no problem to remove
it. I would even completely remove nana from my sources, since due to
the rewrite, this sources do not depend on nana except single
statements.

Possibly, I would add vector assertions and require/ensure statements to
kdebug. This is what we wanted to avoid when we talked about integrating
nana. 

So, how to go on? For a project like KDE, logging and assertions are
definitly not enough debug support. 
Greetings,
--Mirko.
-- 
Denn der  Mensch  liebt und ehrt den  Menschen,  solange er ihn
nicht zu beurteilen vermag, und die Sehnsucht ist ein Erzeugnis
mangelhafter Erkenntnis. (Thomas Mann)

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