Tamar,
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>Jim - I think you're missing Mike's point. Good programming practice says that, for example, every CASE has an OTHERWISE, even if you believe you've enumerated all possibilities in the other cases. There's no way to test that OTHERWISE case, but it's better code to have it there than to remove it.

You're right, and your addition clears up my misunderstanding.

I would think that the programmer would still ensure that such code lines are executed (especially in an interpreted language) even if it meant putting them temporarily into another CASE or doing some other contrivance to test their functionality. But I would agree that system/QA testers wouldn't ever (presumably) test those lines.

thanks

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>Tamar