While I realize the question is really in reference to particulars with 
Marpa, I'd wondered how to "test grammars" as well.  I'd initially thought 
about proving equivalence, but here's a reasonable explanation about why 
that's not possible:

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/231187/an-efficient-way-to-determine-if-two-context-free-grammars-are-equivalent

However, the discussion points to,

"Comparison of Context-free Grammars Based on Parsing Generated Test Data"
http://slps.github.io/testmatch/

In the present paper, we leverage systematic test data generation, by which 
> we mean that test data sets are generated by effective enumeration methods 
> for the coverage criteria of interest. These methods do not require any 
> configuration. Also, these methods imply minimality of the test data sets 
> in both an intuitive and a formal sense.
>

Has anyone any experience with this, or similar, efforts?

On Tuesday, August 9, 2016 at 7:21:55 PM UTC-7, [email protected] wrote:
>
> I know in advance that my target grammar is complex.  So I would like to 
> start at the lower, simpler levels and start testing my lexeme and grammar 
> rules as I write them.
>
> * Can I change the starting rule of a (SLIF) grammar at runtime?  I would 
> like to test very basic rules -- the kind that I'll only see in slices far 
> into a file -- (bottom-up) before defining the grammar from the top down.  
> If I can specify a rule and a string (to G->parse or R->read), I can write 
> easy regression tests that each rule recognizes valid strings and rejects 
> invalid strings.  I could modify the grammar file(s) for each test, but 
> that seems like a bad idea.  I'm all ears if there's a better way to do 
> this.
>
> * At a higher level, can you point me to any great examples of regression 
> tests for a Marpa grammar?  
>
> * Even more generally, how do people develop and test a Marpa grammar?
>
> Thanks!
>
> - Ryan
>
>

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