The point that you're ignoring is that to make the spec work, you need to decide internally where and when to switch strategies. (BTW your refusing to call this switch an "optimization" is disingenuous at best.) Saying "this must work" and "that must be fast" says that you need 2 different strategies. It doesn't say where the boundary between them should be. That boundary should be invisible to the user of your code. And therefore you have an internal code boundary that is not part of the external specification.

Furthermore without knowing the exact implementation, you can't specify how it works, because the appropriate boundary depends on the optimization chosen, which is highly implementation-dependent.

In reply to Re^10: 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

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.