the Language problem with Test Cases

Chris, Christian, and I hammered out something that looks like it allows
us to proceed with authoring test cases.  There are several challenges
we're trying to circumvent:

      - Authoring RIF XML by hand is very hard (and error-prone)
      - Reading RIF XML is very hard
      - We have, as yet, no software to translate between readable 
        syntaxes and RIF XML
      - We have no stable, fully-defined, usable Presentation Syntax

We don't want to wait for solutions to any of the above problems, but we
want to continue working on test cases.   So, here's the proposal for
proceeding: 

     1. Eventually, every RIF test case will have the inputs be
        expressed in XML. This XML is what we expect machines to use in
        running the test cases. 

     2. Most RIF test cases will also be expressed in some human
        syntax.  For this part, we are only interested in syntaxes for
        which a RIF translator implementation is promised.

     3. At some point, the implementations SHOULD be made available so
        that the XML can be generated or tested.  If it is not, the XML
        must be generated and checked by hand (or the test case will
        have to be withdrawn).

This seems to us like the best way to proceed at this point.   It'll be
on the agenda for Tuesday.

       -- Sandro

Received on Thursday, 18 September 2008 15:36:18 UTC