[Test] Review (ACTION-661)

some comments on the proposed FPWD of the RIF Test Specification:

1. We need an XML schema instead of or in addition to the RDF schema.  
Many implementors will not understand the model theory and will turn to 
the test cases ... and again be stymied when they hit this schema.

2. Why do we say these are BLD tests when many are actually Core tests?

3. We have made the task of creating a test harness difficult.  The 
conclusion and non-conclusion "documents" are not legal RIF documents.  
I would expect many RIF implementations will have either a query 
facility or a print builtin.  (unfortunate that we specify neither.)  I 
would expect to use either a query or a print builtin to implement the 
test harness.  I would combine the conclusion "document" wrapped with a 
query or wrapped with a rule that prints "pass" (or "fail" for a 
non-conclusion).  But then, that makes  the conclusion part of the 
premise document, and thus tests such as Local_Constant will fail.  I 
think we should give some guidance that these would be examples of how 
to implement a test harness (provided it can be made to work), and we 
should explain (if we can) why these are not part of the standard.

Received on Monday, 1 December 2008 22:57:49 UTC