[Phil Endecott]
My argument was that for trivial things we actually have the implementation in our minds first and then find ourselves trying to think of some other way of expressing the same thing in order to write down a spec; in the process, we're as likely to make a mistake in the spec as we are to make a mistake in the implementation. Examples: clamp(val,lo,hi) = val<lo ? lo : val>hi : hi : val; vs. clamp(val,lo,hi) returns the middle value when (val,lo,hi) are ordered according to operator<
[Dave Abrahams]
Wow, that certainly is stark. When I try to describe it better in words, it reads just like your implementation. But I'm not sure what that proves.
Amusingly (to me, at least), the implementation is incorrect. It says val > hi instead of hi < val. STL