On 03/04/2010 04:07 AM, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
Anyway, it seems my view is a minority one here.
I don't think that's necessarily the case (I agree with you that randomized testing is a good thing). However, I also agree with others that writing doctests is more important for those that feel like they can write doctests. For example, I just wrote a lot of doctests for RealField (i.e., code that I did not write) and found lots of corner cases that were not handled correctly. I feel like that was more valuable than writing randomized doctests comparing results to mathematica.
If someone were to write a suite of randomized doctests, I would be willing to donate spare cycles to running those doctests. I imagine there are lots of other people that would do the same. I think the question under debate here is more about time priority for those that feel comfortable writing internal consistency checks and normal doctests that exhaustively exercise our own code, rather than whether your idea is good or not.
Since Sage is a volunteer project, *all* volunteer contributions are welcome to be submitted! Your idea is certainly good, so if you feel most comfortable writing randomized tests against another system, go for it! I don't think anyone is against including more testing!
Let me also say that I appreciate your tireless porting of Sage to Solaris. It's made me more sensitive about writing cross-platform code (for example, see my question on #8424 for you).
Thanks, Jason -- Jason Grout -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
