[TxMt] Re: Regression tests for grammars?

[Jeremy Whitlock]

Hello all,
    I love this and it could be used also to validate/test theme coverage.
 What do we have to do to get something like this created so bundle authors
can use it?

Take care,

Jeremy Whitlock (@whitlockjc on Twitter)
http://www.thoughtspark.org


On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 2:03 AM, Michael Sheets <mummer at whitefalls.org>
wrote:

> On Jul 11, 2014, at 4:27 AM, Stefan Daschek <stefan at daschek.net> wrote:
>
> > From my - admittedly somewhat limited - experience with bundle grammars
> I got the feeling that it’s often very hard to improve or fix a grammar
> without accidentally breaking some other parts of it.
> >
> > Has anyone already experimented with regression tests for bundle
> grammars?
>
> The biggest issue with tests for grammars is simply writing tests that are
> worthwhile. The errors you typically see are the exceptional cases you
> wouldn’t have thought to test for. But it can prevent the same error from
> happening twice.
>
> The second issue is that there is no ‘perfect’ way to scope a portion of
> code and thusly the common manner of writing tests would break every time
> you made even the slightest change to the grammar. To be something people
> would use it needs to be relatively painless.
>
> I’ve put a lot of thought into how to solve this for grammars and my
> current best thoughts are:
>
> A two part test with a string of text to be matched and then a series of
> assertions at various points in the string. An example:
>
>         "foo\"bar"
>
>         1:6 – B:constant.character.escape
>         1:8 – string
>
> The string would be parsed and then the matches provide a caret position
> and a scope to match against. Here we use a B: scope to ensure we are
> inside an escape and then after that point ensure the string didn’t end
> early. The scopes are very intentionally as vague as possible to prevent
> minor changes in scopes from invalidating the test. Here we are only
> worried about the string and the escape so it’s all we test for.
>
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