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From: "Keith Allan Shillington" <keith@sd.aonix.com>
Subject: Re: Aonix Ada 95
Date: 1997/03/21
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References: <857938743.26136@dejanews.com> <dewar.857944378@merv>
 <33237061.6A5D@bix.com> 	<33239BEA.21C9@aonix.com> <dewar.858002073@merv>
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 <EACHUS.97Mar17114758@spectre.mitre.org> <dewar.858624303@merv>
Organization: Aonix
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-03-21T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


> Robert Eachus said
> ...  (For those who have never dealt with the ACVC, the
> B-tests are--in 1.x--about 1000 test which not only require you to
> find every error at compile time, but to diagnose it correctly.  Some
> tests have/had hundreds of errors. Every compiler vendor I know spent
> most of their effort during validation getting the B-tests right.
> Most of the rest was spent on C-tests, and A,D,E and L collectively
> accounted for at most 1-2% of the effort.)

Me thinks your numbers are overly pessimized, but, that is all in the past
anyway.  Anyone who bothers to look at the 2.X ACVC suite will find a
stronger emphasis on C and L tests.  It was our expectation in writing them
that the vendors would find a little more need to focus on the implementation
of the executable bits.  And, let us not discount the value of a good error
message from a compiler.

Robert Dewar deftly points out:

<<Given that every line has a comment on it that says ERROR, I have no doubt
that the amazing Kruchten compiler would be able to read through a B test
and announce ERROR on all appropriate lines :-)>>

Takes me back to the days of the Basic interpreter that was possessed of the
single error message: "Huh?"