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

On Mon, Nov 11, 2002 at 05:43:01PM -0800, Dave Whipp wrote:
> "Sean O'Rourke" <[email protected]> wrote in message 
>> One thing the "golden-output" has going for it is that it gets into
>> and out of perl6 as quickly as possible. In other words, it relies on
>> perl6/parrot to do just about the minimum required of it, then passes
>> verification off to outside tools (e.g. perl5). I realize they can be
>> fragile, but at least for the moment, we can't rely on a complete
>> perl6 Test::Foo infrastructure, and I think that in general, we
>> _shouldn't_ require such a thing for the very basic tests. Because if
>> we do, and something basic is broken, all the tests will break
>> because of it, making the bug-hunter's job much more difficult.
> 
> I see where you are coming from ... but is the IO infrastructure
> really the most primitive thing to rely on? It may be at the moment;
> but I expect that it will become more complex. C<print> may be a
> built-in right now; but it should probably move to a module later.

I/O is fairly fundamental, particularly for a language as heavily into
being glue as perl.  I can't see it not being core.

> If we can't rely on C<assert(0)> to kill a test (and C<assert(1) not to);
> then things are pretty badly broken (assuming that C<assert> exists).

Perl's tests are built on Test::More, it uses ok() and is() not
assert().  If we're going to be doing test cases for perl 6 then we
should do them using perl's standard testing format (i.e. Test::More,
Test::Harness, etc.) 

> If we are going to pick a very small subset on which almost all tests
> will depend ... isn't it better to pick the test-infrastructure itself
> to be that dependency; rather that some arbitrary module (like IO).

If your program can't do basic I/O it's probably pretty broken.  Even if
we we're to only rely on the test modules, they also need to be able to
communicate with the outside world.

andrew
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