[imp-hackers] Another topic: ANSI standard test suite

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 5:08 PM, Sam Steingold<sds at gnu.org> wrote:
> this is not good enough.
> the fact that the tests reside in the abcl's repo means that people
> would have to think "how is this related to abcl? is the gcl's repo
> better?" &c.

I agree with ....

> As I said, I think there should be a separate project and gcl and abcl
> should explicitly refer to it (instead of copying it).

...and ECL also does this but...

> Moreover, since this is an ANSI test suite, no #+clisp/#+gcl/#+abcl
> should ever be present there.
> if several results are permitted by the standard, each should be
> accepted from any implementation.

... I strongly disagree on this.

The ANSI test suite has _always_ contained conditionalizations and it
will most likely contain more if we extend it reasonably. How would
you test for instance external formats when the names of these formats
are not even standard, but rather implementation dependent. Not all
tests will make sense on all implementations.

Furthermore, I also advocate testing non-standard extensions and
things that are de-facto standards, such as CLRFI-like additions or
things that several implementations may agree to support. In other
words, it can be more than just a plain ANSI test suite, clearly
marking which tests results belong to ANSI and which do not.

Juanjo

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