[tex-live] Testing TeX and Metafont

[Hans Hagen]

Hi Nelson,

>For several months in the early 1980s, Don Knuth and David Fuchs ...

Interesting thread.

A few questions:

- What is a line of code?

   while ( condition_a and condition_b and condition_c)
   if (condition_x)

are both lines, but the first one has three potential bug and the second 
ond two. Are these tools that you use able to take that into account? Or 
maybe some preprocessing needs to be done:

   while ( condition_a and
           condition_b and
           condition_c)

which makes it three lines. Also, what happens with lines that only hold an 
'end' or so?

>This strongly suggests that we should be developing a large collection
>of (small) additional torture tests that cause much more of TeX and

beware: executing code is not testing behaviour; i guess that the recently 
uncovered leaders (repaired by don) is executed in the tests but it was 
still there; actually it was uncovered when dvi output from tex (texbook) 
was compared to dvi output from nts (it had to do with some rounding; the 
texbook also had the bug but it was kind of maskered).

Hans