🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MARTINC.92Nov9095218@grover.cs.unc.edu>,
martinc@grover.cs.unc.edu (Charles R. Martin) writes: 

> engineering vs. chemistry, there are techniques and methods that apply
> to software engineering that are *used* in computer science, and
> (naturally) methods and techniques from computer science that must be
> used by software engineers.
> 
> As to whether they *should* be separate: of course not.  All software
> engineers know that computer science is a subdiscipline of software
> engineering. 
> --

I've been following this thread with great interest, and thought that
it might be time to inject my bit.  I'll specifically disclaim my 
qualifications here; I'm an undergrad in Cornell CS, where I've been
focussing on theory.  I could probably handwave answers to most of 
Prof. Pratt's lovely list of comp questions other than the graphics/image
processing ones.  I also have a few years' experience as a C grunt in 
a programming house.

I think that an interesting comparison of science vs. engineering vs.
math in computing science can be drawn around the lines of program correctness,
or verification (Q. #12).

There are, empirically, at least three major ways of detecting bugs:
 
  1. Use the program until it fails to work.  

  2. Try to construct a lot of test cases during development.

  3. Try to prove the program correct (in the Gries sense) before coding it,
     and fail.

Certainly, it would be possible to construct an argument that these 
methods correspond to "science", "engineering", and "math" respectively.

Program correctness seems to have a wide range of approaches, which 
seem to cover the field from the clearly "math" to the clearly "engineering".
-- 
Eric Scheirer -- Cornell University, Ithaca, NY -- (607) 277-1899
"I got remote control and a color TV; I don't change channels so they
 must've changed me." -- Billy Joel