I'm mostly sending this email because I had an idea, and it's late, and I don't
want to forget.

Today it occured to me that many Test:: extensions are more about better
diagnostic output than better test comparison.

This stinks:

  want: foo bar
  have: foo bar

So you write some plugin that does the same old comparison but shows:

  want: foo\N{SPACE}bar
  have: foo\N{KLINGON MOMENT OF SILENCE}bar

What if display types could be provided informationally in the TAP stream.  The
stream could include:

  want: foo bar
  have: foo bar
  presentation: Some::Plugin

With the plugin installed, the presentation layer could fix the output to be
useful.  Without it, you still have the data displayed and could presumably
re-display the TAP stream later with the presenter plugin in place.

I am not sure whether this is a good idea, or already well-established as a way
to deal with this annoyance.  Good night.

-- 
rjbs

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