On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 05:44:04PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Now, it strikes me that a profiler is just a coverage tool that also
> records times, and a coverage tool is just a profiler that doesn't.
Well, I think a real coverage tool is bit more than that really. All
the world is not statement coverage. In fact, although it is much
better than nothing, statement coverage is a fairly weak coverage
metric. Ideally we would have branch coverage at least, if not some of
the more powerful metrics.
However, I suspect that we are in a similar position to Pure Software or
whatever they're called, in that their coverage tool fell fairly easily
out of Quantify, but can only do statement coverage. I'm not sure how
or if we could use the debugger to provide other coverage information.
That sort of thing really requires some navel gazing - we would want to
analyse our own parse tree or something. Hopefully that sort of thing
will be possible in Perl 6, if not sooner.
The other option is code instrumentation, but that requires parsing of
the code. Could be done I suppose, but I wouldn't really want to.
--
Paul Johnson - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.pjcj.net
