Re: [xsl] How to never make mistakes when coding?

["Michael Kay michaelkay90@xxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Have you thought about these types of questions? What answers did you come
up with?
>

There is of course a vast literature on software engineering that attempts to
answer your questions, but you may be interested in reading some of my
thoughts on the subject:


https://blog.saxonica.com/mike/2017/02/bugs-how-well-are-we-doing.html

https://blog.saxonica.com/mike/2006/06/killing-bugs.html

https://blog.saxonica.com/mike/2008/12/bugs-that-dont-crawl-out-of-the-woodwo
rk.html

Those blog posts specifically relate to testing of the Saxon product, written
in Java. Over the years I have also, of course, given a great deal of thought
to how we can help users avoid making mistakes when writing XSLT code. XSLT
2.0 introduced stronger type-checking as a response to this requirement, but
it's an optional feature (and with schema-awareness, it's one you have to pay
for) so it's not used nearly as much as it should be, because users of course
try to write their code as quickly as possible rather than thinking about the
debugging task that lies ahead. We have therefore also put a lot of effort
into the Saxon product over the years to try and help you discover errors in
your code even when it's syntactically correct but semantically wrong, for
example writing `true` when you meant `true()`.

Michael Kay
Saxonica