On Thursday 15 March 2007 09:49, brian d foy wrote: > I'm not advocating any change here because I'm perfectly happy with > what we have now, but isn't the problem there that # means too many > things? > > If a comment started with a # (because this is perl), and other things > had some other sigil, would anyone be arguing about which filehandle > they are on?
Maybe. The nice thing about # being overloaded is that really old harnesses *should* recognize diagnostics that even implement the future extensions and ignore or display them as they see fit. They won't get any extra meaning, but they won't crash. One issue that hasn't come up much is that you can't always rely on STDERR being available when a human looks at the test results. Think of testing long-running programs in process, testing in the browser (whether via JavaScript Test.Builder or Apache::Test), and automated smoke tests. Sure, dumping diagnostics to STDERR works fairly well when a human enters the command to run the tests and sits in front of the controlling terminal and can scroll back to see the STDERR output, but that's not the only case of running tests at all (and getting diagnostic output is much, much more useful when you don't have access to the particular computer where the tests fail). -- c
