TAP, Test::Run and TAP::Parser are now Used for the Anarki Arc Test suite

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all!

Arc ( http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html ) is a new dialect of Lisp by Paul 
Graham and others. There's a community effort to hack on Arc and improve it 
over at the open Anarki git repository:

http://arcfn.com/2008/02/git-and-anarki-arc-repository-brief.html

Seeing that a comperhensive test suite was absent, I decided to start writing 
one. Being involved with the development of Test::Run and other TAP efforts, 
I naturally decided to use TAP for it, and so I did. This turned out to be a 
good idea because some of the test programs have been written in Perl.

I've written (and later on enhanced) a rudimentary implementation of a TAP 
emitter in Arc. I also wrote some tests in Perl to test it. The Perl tests 
use Test::More and Test::Trap ( http://search.cpan.org/dist/Test-Trap/ ). The 
Arc tests use the TAP emitting library (found in arctap.arc in the 
repository's root directory).

So far the work on the test suite uncovered several bugs in Arc and one bug in 
Test::Run, and also results in some enhancments to Arc. Plus, I was able to 
better familiarise myself with Arc, and naturally write test suite code which 
helps prevents future regressions.

I should note that I used Test::Run because of its AlternateInterpreters 
plugin (which is an idea I originally derived from something Ovid wrote). 
Currently, my interpreters.conf.yml file reads:

<<<<<<<<<<
---
- cmd: ./arc.sh
  pattern: \.arc(?:\.t)?\z
  type: regex
>>>>>>>>>>

This uses ./arc.sh to run the tests by default. It's a bit more complicated 
than that (see Test.sh), but still the Test-Harness-2.54's prove would not 
do, because it seems the she-bang at the start of the file confuses the Arc 
implementation.

But so far using TAP for the Arc test suite seems like it has been a sound 
choice.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

I'm not an actor - I just play one on T.V.