On 7 Apr 2007, at 01:11, Fergal Daly wrote:
To address the whatever, BEGIN/END draws you into the XMLish problems
of waiting for a complete document before acting on the contents and
even if you avoid this it still makes it hard to interleave streams.
You don't have to wait for END any more than you have to wait for the
end of the stream now. As you receive each line you know precisely
what its context is. The END just pops a frame off the context stack.
You may of course /elect/ to wait for an END before, say, outputting
a summary. Currently the only END you can wait for is the end of
stream - so we actually get /more/ control over when output is
displayed.
I'm starting to think that every line should be prefixed by a test
number, including diags (diags are not currently associated with a
particular test but could be made so) so something like
I believe you may have mentioned this before :)
I'm not sure how it helps with interleaving streams (or why that
might be desirable...). If you just mean you can multiplex lines from
mulitple streams into a single stream then you're mistaken. The test
numbering for the two streams could easily overlap.
Your numbering scheme also makes it relatively hard to wrap a stream
as a chunk: you'd have to process each line that contained a test
number to prepend the chunk number.
These two tests
# Test 1
1.2
1.2.1
1.2.2
--- cut ---
# Test 2
1
2
3
would have to be rewritten as
# Test 1
1.1.2
1.1.2.1
1.2.2
# Test 2
2.1
2.2
2.3
And in general there's a reason why programming languages favour
nested blocks over numbered paragraphs :)
--
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net
