On 11/06/11 14:10, Andrew Coppin wrote:
OK, so suppose you sit down and write a complicated string parser. Now
how do you test that it works correctly?
If you have a function that turns a parse tree back into text again,
you can try verifying that a round-trip is the identity function.
Except perhaps sometimes it isn't. Perhaps a given expression has more
than one equivalent representation. A round-trip from string and back
again is even less likely to be stable.
So what's the best way to attack this problem?
_
If your parse tree has a "show" instance (or better yet, a pretty-print
function) then you can generate random parse trees, print them, and then
show that the parse returns an equal tree.
However if you want to have useful error messages or a wider range of
representations than just those generated by "show" then you will need
to write a QuickCheck variant on the "show" function that emits all
these variations, which is likely to be rather more work.
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
