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Motzkin paths and source code silhouettes
Consider a language that just contains assignments and if-statements (no else arm). Nesting level could be used to visualize programs written in such a language; an if represented by an Up step, an...
View ArticleHaving all the source code in one file
An early, and supposedly influential, analysis of the Coronavirus outbreak was based on results from a model whose 15,000 line C implementation was contained in a single file. There has been lots of...
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Source code discovery, skipping over the legal complications
The 2020 US elections introduced the issue of source code discovery, in legal cases, to a wider audience. People wanted to (and still do) check that the software used to register and count votes works...
View ArticleCode bureaucracy can reduce the demand for cognitive resources
A few weeks ago I discussed why I thought that research code was likely to remain a tangled mess of spaghetti code. Everybody’s writing, independent of work-place, starts out as a tangled mess of...
View ArticleMutation testing: its days in the limelight are over
How good a job does a test suite do in detecting coding mistakes in the program it tests? Mutation testing provides one answer to this question. The idea behind mutation testing is to make a small...
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Electronic Evidence and Electronic Signatures: book
Electronic Evidence and Electronic Signatures by Stephen Mason and Daniel Seng is not the sort of book that I would normally glance at twice (based on its title). However, at this start of the year I...
View ArticleTwo failed software development projects in the High Court
When submitting a bid, to be awarded the contract to develop a software system, companies have to provide information on costs and delivery dates. If the costs are significantly underestimated, and/or...
View ArticleAcademic recognition for creating and supporting software
A scientific paper is supposed to contain enough information that somebody skilled in the field can perform the experiment(s) described therein (issues around the money needed to obtain access to the...
View Articlesemgrep: the future of static analysis tools
When searching for a pattern that might be present in source code contained in multiple files, what is the best tool to use? The obvious answer is grep, and grep is great for character-based pattern...
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Cost-effectiveness decision for fixing a known coding mistake
If a mistake is spotted in the source code of a shipping software system, is it more cost-effective to fix the mistake, or to wait for a customer to report a fault whose root cause turns out to be that...
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