regarding testsuite

[Simon Marlow]

Claus Reinke wrote:

> but we're talking about testing ghc here, so we want to expose bugs.
> it sounds like a bootstrap problem: write a small program that exercises
> the low-level stuff needed for the main testsuite, and run that first: 
> if it works start the main suite of tests, otherwise, you've got a small 
> program to track down bugs in.
> 
>> * Python, being interpreted, makes a nicer language in which to make an
>>  EDSL for this.
> 
> i'm not sure i buy that, but if there was truth in it, that ought to 
> change!-) nothing against python itself, but i thought the aim was to 
> get rid of dependencies, such as perl, rather than add them.

You might well argue that Haskell *should* be the right tool for writing
the testsuite driver, and I couldn't disagree.  But it's not the right tool
at the moment, which is why I used Python.

The testsuite is an EDSL, as Ian pointed out.  But you really don't want to
have to compile the test descriptions against the testsuite driver code
each time you change one, so you have to use the GHC API somehow.
Unfortunately this is just way harder than just using Python's execFile().
Try it and let me know how you get on!

Cheers,
	Simon