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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Ada95 to ANSI_C converter
Date: 1997/04/07
Message-ID: <dewar.860442122@merv>#1/1
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References: <dewar.859432540@merv> <dewar.859559977@merv>
 <5htg0a$v8v$1@news.nyu.edu> <dewar.859987799@merv> <E80s46.H1D@world.std.com>
 <E840C7.LCr@thomsoft.com> <dewar.860184524@merv> <334929E8.4E68@gdls.com>
Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c
Date: 1997-04-07T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


iArthur Schwarz says

<<And this is not to attempt to derate ACT or your own efforts. Only to
say that
IMO the issue is not meaningful in that failing to pass a "nasty test
case" means
that the language feature tested is not useable and the compiler
erroneous.>>

(by the way it would be appreicated if you keep your line length under 80!)

Yes, I know this seems reasonable to those without direct experience in
defining languages and dealing with language standards, but the fact of the
matter is that for real life languages, there are lots of murky areas which
are not so easily adjudicated, and where there is little poitn in writing
tests. The ARG found it useful to have a category "pathological", which
means, yes, the language is defined to behave in (surprising/silly/clearly-
wrong/absurd etc) manner Y, but it is not worth trying to fix it, or to
worry about it too much, since it is too marginal to be of interest (and
please, ACVC folks do NOT write stupid tests).

Note that the business in Arthur's message about "stressing a compiler" is
not relevant at all. Stressing compilers is a good thing. We are talking
about stressing the *language* here!