Re: Pascal for MSP430. Quality assurance tests advice wanted.

Boris Skuin wrote:
> I have written Pascal Cross compiler for MSP430. I have tested
> it rather carefully (test programs approx. 3000 lines long), but from
> time to time (very rarely though) a bug is founded.
> Are there any good methods of 100% compiler testing, or may be someone
> already has good Pascal compiler tests as example?


There is no 100% compiler test known to theorists (though Zamir
Bavel's work in automata theory implies that they are possible,
it's not much help in actually showing how to construct one).


But for practical purposes, I consider Knuth's sourcecode for TeX to
be a very nearly exhaustive test of a pascal compiler. It's a very
large program and full of a huge variety of very cutting-edge
programming technique. Compiling/porting it has revealed
hitherto-unknown bugs in every pascal compiler it's run on.


Bear
--

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