Tests and software process
Hans-Martin Mosner
hmm at heeg.de
Thu Nov 2 06:28:09 UTC 2006
Andreas Raab schrieb:
> I wrote those tests to make sure we have consistent (bit-identical)
> results for various floating point functions across different Croquet
> VMs. How these tests ended up in 3.9 I have no idea - they are part of
> Croquet, for sure, and in the context of Croquet they make perfect
> sense (and they pass if you use a Croquet VM and they fail if you
> don't - which is exactly what they should do).
That's good. Just out of curiosity: Does the FloatMathPlugin used in
Croquet fail on any invalid inputs (e.g. numbers outside the range -1..1
for arcCos) or does it return NaN? I'd guess it returns NaN because
otherwise some of the tests could not possibly succeed.
>
> To me, it points out more a problem with the selection of code being
> put into the base image rather than any failing of the test itself.
> The test is meaningful in the context it was designed for.
Agreed. As far as I remember, the FloatMathPlugin for Croquet uses a
software implementation for some operations to achieve the goal of
bit-identical computation on all platforms. This probably means that the
functions are quite a bit slower, so including this in an environment
where the requirement is not present does not make much sense.
So removing these tests from the general Squeak image seems like the
reasonable thing to do, right?
BTW, I will try to run the tests with a Croquet VM soo, so then I will
know the answer to my first question :-)
Cheers,
Hans-Martin
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