[Axiom-developer] RE: unit testing

[Bill Page]

On April 1, 2007 3:39 PM Tim Daly wrote:
> 
> A slightly higher level of design goal can be seen in the
> ffrac.spad domain that I just sent out.

I did not see this email. Could you please re-send it?

> You'll notice that it has unit tests embedded before each
> operation. These will serve a couple purposes, both unit test
> and regression tests. That way we can document what works and
> we can check when something breaks.
>

That sounds good.
 
> Of course, the inline comments are not really the "right" way
> to construct and document these tests. They will eventually be
> extractable chunks so we can run unit and regression tests on
> them.

It sounds very similar to the way the Sage developers embed
regression "doc tests" into their code. I think it is an
excellent idea.

> 
> It would be useful when constructing new domains if examples
> of operations were embedded in the pamphlet files in a
> standard style so we could achieve these goals.
> 

Yes! We should have a standardized way to 'notangle' and
execute the tests in every pamphlet file. I think this
could be easily done with the existing noweb and makefile
methods. All we need is for someone to define the standard
style for writing these code chunks in pamphlet files.

I nominate you. :-)

Regards,
Bill Page.