On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 09:19:51AM -0700, Jared Rhine wrote: > [Herbert == [EMAIL PROTECTED] on Wed, 8 Sep 2004 15:18:27 +0000] > > Herbert> And any way for an overeager newbie to help? > > The classic answer is "write tests". [...] Just by browsing > lists archives, in a few days, you could probably write a few dozen > placeholder tests.
Indeed, and I'd say that in the immediate future we'll be wanting rules/grammar tests (to test the grammar engine) more than we'll need perl 6 code, although we'll certainly take that as well. > You couldn't be very confident of them, given you > don't have a language implementation to test them with. In the case of p6 rules, you can at least test them against Perl6::Rules from CPAN. > Think very simple tests. Maybe 3 tests for each of the operators thus > far defined. Exactly. > If the first thing implemented is the grammar engine, Patrick/et al > will need test code to parse. I'm sure many people on this list know this already, but it's worth pointing out to newbies that the "grammar engine" doesn't directly parse Perl 6; the grammar engine will parse/compile the Perl 6 grammar (still being written using perl 6 rules), and the output of *that* becomes the "Perl 6 compiler" (running in Parrot) which then compiles Perl 6 source code into Parrot (or PIR or AST or whatever). So, in addition to having Perl 6 code to test the compiler, we also need a good set of Perl 6 rules to test the grammar engine. :-) Pm
