From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,42427d0d1bf647b1 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Ada Core Technologies and Ada95 Standards Date: 1996/04/24 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 151307732 references: <00001a73+00002c20@msn.com> <828038680.5631@assen.demon.co.uk> <828127251.85@assen.demon.co.uk> <315FD5C9.342F@lfwc.lockheed.com> <3160EFBF.BF9@lfwc.lockheed.com> <829851188.11037@assen.demon.co.uk> <830205883.24190@assen.demon.co.uk> organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-04-24T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: John McCabe says "You seem to be defending a "make it fast, THEN make it work" philosophy here (which I completely disagree with) and confusing quality with run-time performance. I have seen the effect of this kind of philosophy - my current compiler supports the ATAC co-processor, yet has had trouble compiling some basic Ada constructs. I would choose 2. over 1. as I believe a _quality_ compiler is one which compiles the language completely, not one which does some parts of the language quickly." John, I can for SURE conclude from your writing here that you have never looked at the ACVC tests closely, and also that you have limited experience in the definition of language definitions. The fact of the matter is that for *any* language of any complexity, you can find extremely marginal cases which are not worth testing. Study for example the Rosen tasking anomoly as an example (I don't want to waste space describing this case, since it is well known to anyone who has followed the ACVC process). It is a common naive viewpoint that (a) the RM precisely defines the Ada language -- of course it does not, since it is not a formal document, and that (b) it is therefore absolutely clear what conformance means, and that (c) it is therefore valuable to test any aspect of this conformance. I guess that neither you nor Ken have paid any attention to what is going on with ACVC 2.1, but the whole idea of this effort is to make sure that the ACVC suite better reflects actual user usage. I would be interested in comments from either of you on this reformalation, and in your reaction to the new tests, but to make useful comments you will have to sepdn more time actually studying the tests and the ACVC process.