Your procedure above is more akin to scientific induction than mathematical induction.

I am sorry if I wasn't clear, but I am not talking about doing mathematical induction, but more structural induction. Which is a more generalized version of mathematical induction. Which to my understanding says that to prove P(x) you must test P with both a empty and non-empty value of x.

Which is fine, but it isn't really a formal method in that you are not proving anything, just building evidence that code seems to work.

I am not hoping it to be a truely formal method, but more a basis to build good unit tests off of. It seems to me that testing arbitrary data against manually calculated results (which is commonly how people built unit tests), is not as good as some kind of (possibly) provable statement which can be translated into a unit test.

-stvn

In reply to Re^2: Theorem proving and Unit testing by stvn
in thread Theorem proving and Unit testing by stvn

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