Geez, you've sure drunk the kool-aide, haven't you?

You say that, Reality has corner cases, code doesn't. But in the real world there are cases where people need optimizations. (Less than most people think, but it does happen.) Optimizations naturally lead to having corner cases. Those corner cases should generally not be visible in the interface. Therefore code sometimes does need corner cases that aren't part of reality.

Now you may think that we should never optimize. But just today I wrote about an example where not having the optimization leads to bugs. Underscoring my point even more, that optimization should be invisible in the interface, and the initial implementation of this optimization had bugs in its corner cases. (Interestingly, the corner cases where it had bugs would not have been visible to a code coverage test like Devel::Cover, underscoring even more the need for white-box tests on it!) Therefore if your ideal is fewer bugs, then we have a concrete case where you really want to have corner cases that are not visible in the interface.

In short, you're being blinded by your fanaticism. Real code sometimes does have corner cases that aren't visible in the interface. Those corner cases should either be removed or tested with white-box tests. I agree that often it should be removed, but you go too far when you say that they should always be removed.

In reply to Re^8: Corner cases are not always "code smell" by tilly
in thread Neither system testing nor user acceptance testing is the repeat of unit testing (OT) by pg

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