Re: HOWTO: Writing Perl6 Tests (was: Project Start: Section 1)

> Hm.  I'm not sure how well it goes with the Perl philosophy ("the perl
> language is what the perl interpreter accepts"), but we could embed the
> _real_ test cases in whatever formal spec happens.  This would be the
> excruciatingly boring document only read by people trying to implement
> perl6.  I don't think real tests, which exercise specific corner cases,
> mix very well with user-level documentation of any sort.

Yes, we should identify 2 types of tests: those that explore user-centric
corner cases; and those that explore implementation-centric corner cases.
User-centric tests are "real", but they aren't "unit-tests".

One of the goals of perl6 is to create a reasonably regular languages --
without too many exceptions to exceptions of a context-specific rule. ;). If
this goal is attained, then there won't be too many user-visible corner
cases ... so the document won't be too tedious.

The perl6.documentation project should focus on these user-centric tests. It
is possible (likely) that people creating these tests will find things to
spill over onto the implementation-tests; but that probably shouldn't be a
goal of the documentation.


Dave.