What every C Programmer should know about undefined behavior #2/3

There was another tool for Ruby that would randomly alter your code at runtime (!) and see how you handled the resulting errors. I am having a really hard time remembering the name, though...

The reason for using something like Z is that it is implementation-independent, so it doesn't make any difference if you're writing in C, C++, LISP or Prolog. There will be a valid mapping.

The disadvantage of Z is that in the same way the same specification can produce many implementations, the same implementation can produce many specifications. These will not be of equal use and I know of no easy way to generate the specification in a way that guarantees usefulness.

(For those more familiar with Z as the starting point, I'm totally inverting the flow. This may shock some. Sorry. With this scheme, I'm solely concerned with back-engineering what the specification of the code is from the code, not in generating code from a specification.)

The rationale is that Z is intended to be easier to validate than code. Easier, not easy. It's still hard work. But doing the validation (which is the hardest part) in a single frame of reference and converting to it from the different langauges (which is hard but not as bad) should require less work than writing a validator specific to each language.

That isn't quite right. You can easily write a program that answers those questions *if they have an answer* -- the halting problem is related to the fact that there might not be an answer at all. It's entirely possible that those particular questions do have answers, though, which case a computer program could find it. But this doesn't help much in practice because that computer program probably won't finish until sometime after the heat-death of the universe.

> You can say "all strings must be UTF-8", but how can you explain that to a computer? There's always exceptions to deal with (the result of read() for example).

Oh, but actually this is easy! Any reasonably competent statically-typed language can do this. E.g., in C++, you define a type "utf8_string", and you make sure that any publicly accessible way of constructing an instance does appropriate validity checking. Then code that assumes valid utf8 just declares that it takes input of type utf8_string. read(), of course, doesn't return a utf8_string, so if you want to read a string and then you want to pass it to some code that assumes utf8 (maybe somewhere else entirely in your program, after its been passed through 10 other functions), the compiler won't let you unless you sanitize it first. And as you refactor your APIs, the conversion naturally gets moved around to be in the right place.

It works great. But I've only seen one project that used C++ like this. It's very sad :-(.