OK, perl6-language is getting scary again ;-) So here's something else to think about. Code coverage.
We don't have to worry about how to do it here. That's a problem for internals, and they seem to be solving it quite well without my interference at the moment, even if they are not aware of that. But it's often nice to be able to provide information to the coverage tool which it may not be able to figure out on its own. In most coverage tools, this sort of information is bolted onto the language, usually in the form of special comments. It would be nice to be able to design something useful into Perl 6 from the start. So I would like to see able to tag arbitrary information onto just about everything, including files, packages, classes, subroutines, blocks, control structures, statements, lines, expressions, variables and whatever else I've forgotten about. Properties can be attached to some of these. Can we generalise this at all? Of course, the applicability of this is not limited to code coverage, so it would be nice to have something as general and multi purpose as possible. The sort of data I'm thinking about includes: - this statement should never be executed - this class is a singleton - these two conditional statements have the same condition - the values that this variable can take are constrained by that variable - these two subroutines are mutually exclusive - use one or the other But I don't want language support for saying that, that seems to be a problem for the applications that want the data, although I'd be glad to be shown that I am wrong and that the language can support that in a clean and concise way. Instead, I just want somewhere to hang arbitrary data. Thoughts? -- Paul Johnson - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pjcj.net
