More chronicles of brainstorming from TPC. Last year at TPC, Hugo asked for ideas about testing the internal C functions of Perl. Testing perl itself is ok, but if we can test at an even finer grained level of the C API many bugs can be more easily caught. Additionally the documentation will be improved in the process (can't test it if you don't know what it's supposed to do) and the XS mechanism might also be improved as more people have to touch it to test it.
At the time, there was nothing to do this except write tests in C, and that sucks. It's hard enough to find people to write tests in Perl. Then Ingy comes along with Inline::C. One of the tricks he pulled off at YAPC::Europe was writing a simple Inline module which exposed all the internal C functions as perl functions. AH HA! Now we can test C functions just like any other Perl function. So, this is a request to place Inline::C into 5.9 to facilitate easy testing of the C API. -- Michael G. Schwern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/ Perl Quality Assurance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kwalitee Is Job One IMHO bugs in Perl 5 shouldn't carry over to Perl 6. (Unless, of course, we *like* the bugs... ;) -- Ken Fox in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
