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Except your example is buggy | 189 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Are you serious?
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, August 05 2012 @ 12:08 PM EDT

First: Given that my point was specifically focused on refuting that:

If it is identifiably and unmistakenly copied, there must be _some_ creative freedoms exercised,
by identifying the fact that such logic is very limited to a very small set of differences..... you're correcting me on the bugginess of my code is kind of side-tracking the main point. A possible straw man if you will.

Second: I have 15+ years experience in developing code, 13 of those years has been with the same language. So informing me that "Writing code is harder than you think" is somewhat insulting. Especially given the context of the function in the example.

Third: I did not author the code following the specific punctuation of any language that I'm aware of. As a result, to the best of my knowledge the code won't even compile.

Fourth: I applied the specification based on the name of the function alone. As a result, I personally can see several different deviations of what could actually apply so my code will not work in all possible scenarios - but then neither would the code authored by jjs. For example, what if the range check was supposed to be to test the length of a character field. The value is a string. The high is the max length, the low the min length. The point being: change the spec from what I assumed and my code is inherently "buggy" due to the spec.

Fifth: Depending on whether or not the particular language in question considers the range values inclusively or exclusively would define how checking "3 in 3 to 3" would play out. So while it may not work in the language(s) you're most familiar with, it is valid for the one I work with. Admittedly I've never tested that exact scenario. However, given that it would work for a range defined within a loop, I highly suspect it will work with an IF statement. When I get back to work after my vacation, I'm going to test that exact scenario and post the results.

And Finally: This was such a huge waste of time to have to explain the above given the more important aspect is that the original poster apparently figures a range check function contains creative elements rather than being almost totally functional. But then... I feel rather insulted with the condescending tone in your final statement. Granted, in some languages you are correct that 3 would not evaluate properly in "3 to 3". Can you admit there are languages where it likely will evaluate properly?

Just to clarify the language: I work with Oracle PL/SQL code.

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Except your example is buggy
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, August 06 2012 @ 09:53 AM EDT
You're making an assumption about the nature of his 'between' operator that
doesn't hold up in any instances I'm aware of.

For example, in T-SQL...

DECLARE @low as int;
DECLARE @high as int;
DECLARE @value as int;

SET @low = 3;
SET @high = 3;
SET @value = 3;

IF(@value BETWEEN @low and @high)
BEGIN
PRINT 'True';
END
ELSE
BEGIN
PRINT 'False';
END

...will print 'True'.

I've never run into a 'between operator where the range was written with
exclusive (rather than inclusive) boundaries.

Also, given the context of the RangeCheck function under discussion, I believe
it can be safely assumed that the class(es) calling RangeCheck will not send the
low/high boundary values to the function swapped. If they do, it would be a bug
in *those* classes, not in RangeCheck.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Here's an interesting question
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, August 06 2012 @ 04:30 PM EDT

Given the range of difficulty from "pre-school simple" to "just this side of impossible", the question is:

    What role does level of difficulty have in deciding Copyrightability?

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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