> Hm. I'm not sure how well it goes with the Perl philosophy ("the perl > language is what the perl interpreter accepts"), but we could embed the > _real_ test cases in whatever formal spec happens. This would be the > excruciatingly boring document only read by people trying to implement > perl6. I don't think real tests, which exercise specific corner cases, > mix very well with user-level documentation of any sort.
Yes, we should identify 2 types of tests: those that explore user-centric corner cases; and those that explore implementation-centric corner cases. User-centric tests are "real", but they aren't "unit-tests". One of the goals of perl6 is to create a reasonably regular languages -- without too many exceptions to exceptions of a context-specific rule. ;). If this goal is attained, then there won't be too many user-visible corner cases ... so the document won't be too tedious. The perl6.documentation project should focus on these user-centric tests. It is possible (likely) that people creating these tests will find things to spill over onto the implementation-tests; but that probably shouldn't be a goal of the documentation. Dave.