On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 06:24:06PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 12:14:43AM +0100, Paul Johnson wrote:
> > Well, I think a real coverage tool is bit more than that really. All
> > the world is not statement coverage. In fact, although it is much
> > better than nothing, statement coverage is a fairly weak coverage
> > metric. Ideally we would have branch coverage at least, if not some of
> > the more powerful metrics.
>
> I'm fairly ignorant about anything beyond basic coverage, as I'm sure
> most everyone else on this list is as well. Could you whip out a
> summary of useful coverage techniques?
>
>
> > I'm not sure how
> > or if we could use the debugger to provide other coverage information.
> > That sort of thing really requires some navel gazing - we would want to
> > analyse our own parse tree or something. Hopefully that sort of thing
> > will be possible in Perl 6, if not sooner.
>
> At this point, Kurt will helpfully volunteer to say a few words about the
> backend compiler and its utility here. Kurt?
The backend compiler is useful.
You probably wanted more detail. It's pretty trivial to analyze
coverage of subroutines and packages using a backend compiler. Line-
by-line coverage is a bit more of a sticky wicked. And, of course,
analyzing coverage via AUTOLOAD, symbolic references, or eval $string
is nigh impossible.
What specifically would be useful?
- Kurt
