Re: new style of tests

[etienne grossmann]

  Hello,

          did I oversleep? 
           VVVVVVVVVV  
Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 06:34:31 +0100 (BST)
From: address@hidden (Paul Kienzle)

#  >One problem I see is that once an error occurs, the remaining tests
#  >are skipped.  That is probably OK when you are running tests
#  >interactively, but for automated tests, it would be nice to keep going
#  >with the next test.

#  done.  I added the notion of evaluation blocks, and they quickly
#  evolved into something powerful.

#  %! << code>>
#       arbitrary code; if it calls error() or has syntax errors then test fails
#  %! <<noisy code>>
#       tests to run if 'verbose' or interactive; asks for keypress when done
#  %! <<assert expression::answer>>
#       if expression!=answer, then test fails and displays both
#  %! <<usage  name(args)>>
#       if name(args); does NOT signal an error, then test fails
#  %! <<error  code>>
#       if code does NOT signal an error, then test fails
#  %! <<shared x,y,z>>
#       variables shared between the evaluation contexts
#  %! <<# whatever>>
#       comment out the entire test

#  I don't know about the syntax.  It was pretty much the first thing that
#  popped into my head.  Unless the octave parser is trained to ignore these
#  test blocks, then we are constrained to have some sort of comment character
#  at the beginning of every line.  Emacs support would be nice, but I'm not
#  even going to consider that until the syntax has been vetted by a few
#  others.

  That looks quite flexible and powerful indeed. Note that anything
that can be parsed can be put after 'endfunction', in a source
file. Unparsable things cause a warningAnd maybe it isn't too hard to
have octave ignore everything (even unparsable things) after a
'endfunction' in a function. (perl ignores everything after a line
containing '__END__' or '__DATA__').

  Cheers,

  Etienne