Re: Ada policy

[kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu (Richard Kenner)]

    *Some* tests are proprietary code.  But there are all the Ada
    testcases you've sent to the lists over the years (apart from those
    derived from ACATS), which are public even though they may be
    synthetic tests to cover problems originally shown in proprietary
    code, and tests that were submitted to GCC Bugzilla, and tests written
    by the authors of front-end features (rather than based on proprietary
    code showing a bug) when they add such features.

Sorry, I wasn't clear.

What I meant was that virtually all of the *original* test cases were
proprietary code.  There have certainly been times when I (or somebody ele)
has synthesized smaller tests from those.  But doing so in general takes a
lot of time and isn't always possible (e.g. in the case of reload or
scheduling bugs where changing *anything* in the source makes the problem go
away.

As I said, there are indeed a large number of tests cases that can be added
to a harness: those that were posted and at least 200 tests that were written
specifically to test new features.  But we need the harness.

    (If testcases suitable for automated testing aren't routinely written
    when new front end features are added, then starting writing such
    tests to accompany future features is simply part of following the
    usual GCC development practice followed for other front ends.)

Usually, when new languages features are added to Ada, the "language folks"
write new ACATS tests for them.  That has not been happening recently, but
people who are implementing features from Ada 2005 have been writing tests in
the ACATS style for them.  These should eventually make their way into the
official ACATS suite, but there needs to be a place for them in the meantime.