On 24/04/2018 22:51, Theo wrote:
> druck  wrote:
>> The use of ambiguous instructions to indicate parenthesis, or anything
>> else, would have been useless, or even worse than useless. Similarly
>> even when the full source code is available, you do not rely on the
>> comments, as they are often out of date or just wrong. There is only one
>> thing that tells you want the code is doing, and that is the code itself.
>
> And that only tells you half of the story.  The reason I pointed to the work
> of Alastair Reid and others is that to reason about what the code is doing,
> you have to know what instructions mean.  That is surprisingly tricky.  Even
> simple arithmetical operations get difficult when you start talking floating
> point, and then there's questions about accelerators, system control,
> caches, MMUs, system on chip components...

That's why you don't just look at it to figure out what you think it
does, you write tests to ensure it does what you think it does.

---druck

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