# How to be more confident about your own programs: an example using Perl

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

It was Edsger W. Dijkstra, the famous computer scientist, who wrote these words in his note named “How do we tell truths that might hurt?“. I am sure that many people didn’t like to read them, and didn’t understand what he meant.

Although it is not my intention to discuss his words, I want to present a simple example that demonstrates how mathematics can be used to program better and to make you more confident about your own programs.

This post includes a fair amount of mathematical definitions and concepts, but they should not be difficult to understand. After the mathematical discussion, I present an example using the Perl programming language (it also applies to languages like C or Java).

## The Problem

The problem I am going to deal with, involves the ceiling and floor functions. If you don’t remember, the floor of a real number $x$ is (usually) written as $\lfloor{}x\rfloor$ and it is defined as the greatest integer that is at most $x$. Similarly, the ceiling of a real number $x$ is written as $\lceil{}x\rceil$ and it is defined as the smallest integer that is at least $x$.

The goal is to implement the ceiling function supposing that our programming language only provides the floor function to round numbers. Formally, given a real $x$, we want to calculate an expression $e$ such that:

$\lceil{}x\rceil = \lfloor{}e\rfloor ~~.$