Re: Testing

Responses inline:

> El 15 may 2018, a las 18:48, [email protected] escribió:

> For the purpose of community discussion, can someone please define or give examples of "specs"? This is a nebulous term to me and since I'm not the one using/asking for it, I can't really talk about the suggestion until there's some clarification. My biggest question is - is it different than documentation? How/why? I can't really think of anything that is a specification that shouldn't also be documentation, unless you're also considering implementation details.
> 

(In addition to James' points)

To draw an analogy, here's a toy example and then a more real-world example. Hopefully my connection between the two is clear:

  - Toy example: if we were writing a spec for Array.reverse, we could specify a property that must always hold:

    {|a| a.reverse.reverse == a}

And then to property test we just blast it with 100 random arrays and check that the property always holds

  - A more real-world example, that I think we all wish we'd written a spec for: there's the whole Impulse.ar(0) annoyance, where we didn't really define whether f(-1) == f(0), or f(-1) == 0 or what. If we had written a formal spec of some sort:
    a) We'd be more likely to have noticed we hadn't thought of that case
    b) If we _had_ come up with a rule (e.g. let's say we had settled on the f(-1) == f(0) "rule"), then we'd have something to test against and make sure all UGens conform to


>  For example, I wrote the test suite for the lexer and parser and compiler because I wanted to make a number of improvements there. I also wrote a ton of tests for inter-process communication between server and sclang because I knew there was a desire to fix that in future work, and I didn't want the lack of tests or the burden of manual testing to get in the way of that.
> 

🙏

Tom
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