On Tue, Sep 02, 2008 at 12:32:49PM -0700, Darren Duncan wrote: > Patrick R. Michaud wrote: >> I think it's good to have a prototype Test.pm that we can point to as >> a reference, but I don't think we need to try to designate it as being >> "official". > > [...] > 2. The Perl 6 language spec itself would specify a basic set of test > routines built-in to the language, in a Test namespace, much as it > defines collections of routines now for such as numbers and arrays and > standard I/O. And so the basic test routines would be formally defined > in a Synopsis document.
I disagree. The testing we're likely want to do as part of the language test suite may be substantially different from what we want to provide to module writers for testing. In particular, I think that the test suite harness should require only a minimal Perl 6 implementation (note I said "harness", not the tests themselves), whereas it's much more reasonable that a testing system used by module writers could/should assume a fully working Perl 6 implementation. It's a difference of "bootstrapping" versus "running environment". > I also don't see the possibility of our "getting it wrong" in the design > to be such a big deal, since the odds are anything we think of now will > work well for many years, as Test.pm/Test::More has been fairly stable > already and meanwhile Perl 6 is versioned now, so we could make an > incompatible change to the Test related language spec in the future, and > as long as users say "use Perl-6.0.0" their code relying on the > older/current Test.pm like interface won't break. "Perl 6 is versioned now" is a misnomer. The *spec* calls for a versioned Perl 6, but I'm not aware that any of the implementations do much with that. At any rate, relying on handling multiple versions of Perl 6 to run Test.pm is exactly one of those things I'd like to avoid in the official test suite. Pm
