12 May
2005
12 May
'05
8:49 p.m.
So it's nothing to do with stifling your
creativity: be as creative
as you like. It's just unlikely that any of us (including you) will
ever know whether your prorams (or at least any of them of
significant size) are correct or not.
And this is just as true of people who use such formal methods. Manual
verification is as prone to errors as anything else humans do, and
automated verification involves programs far too large and complex to
be even moderately confident they're bug-free.
(Which is not to say that verifiers can't be useful tools. Just that
they don't provide the kind of "proof" level of confidence that your
implicit contrast implies you think they do.)
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