[Axiom-developer] RE: regression testing

[Bill Page]

On April 1, 2007 3:35 PM Tim Daly wrote:
> 
> Bill,
> 
> Sweet! Nice hack using InputForm.
> I'll make this example into an input file for regression
>

I'll take "hack" as a complement, but I don't think of it
as any kind of abuse of the purpose of the InputForm domain.
It seems to me that someone had exactly this use in mind when
they wrote the 'expr$InputForm' function that takes InputForm
to OutputForm in the way we expect to write the input to the
intepreter. The only think I migh have done differently is to
make this the default coercion to OuputForm rather than the
Lisp-ish notation that is currently displayed for things of
type InputForm.
 
> As part of the effort to build a regression test suite
> I've been rewriting the input files into pamphlet format.
> 

Great.

> I also picked up a book this yesterday to update my
> understanding of limits and to get some idea of the range
> of limits that axiom can and cannot do currently (as part
> of looking at the Gruntz limit algorithm). I've been writing
> these examples into input files so we can capture the results
> permanently. 

Excellent. I would be great if we could find someone to
implement Gruntz in Axiom. I also tried Ondrej's limit
example on Maxima and Reduce and note that while Axiom
returnes "failed" (which is truthful but unhelpful), both
Maxima and Reduce returns incorrect results. See

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/SandBoxSymPy

> 
> It would be great if everyone could capture their testing
> examples with an explanation.  The current input files are
> fairly sparse in their text but they do show some interesting
> tricks I'd forgotten Axiom can do.
> 

I agree.

Regards,
Bill Page.