[Shootout-list] NOT ACCEPTED: Program should use exception handling.

[skaller]

On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 05:19, Isaac Gouy wrote:

> > Call/CC or Common Lisp's escape clauses should be allowed
> afaict CL has 'Conditions' 
> Scheme? http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-34/srfi-34.html

If you reject Felix on *my* interpretation
you have to reject call/cc based solutions too, and I also
said that before: Felix is using a related technique to Scheme,
in both cases control is transfered to an explicit continuation.
There is no 'catching' of an exception in either case.

However the technique *does* do the fundamental thing exception
handling requires -- discards a context and branches to an 
alternate thread of control.

But I do NOT want to argue about this. My opinion is:

The whole point of the Shootout is to compare different
languages, and there is no commonly agreeable way to
define what 'same thing' actually means.

Therefore, same-way tests should simply be removed
because they're inconsistent with the intent of the
Shootout. Functional testing is the only way.
And even then, LOC is a difficult measurement .. :)

In the first instance, simply remove the requirement
for the existing tests.

Thanks to Isaac's new design we now have a Sandbox to design
new tests in. Why not accept that the tests are flawed,
and just get on with designing new ones that aren't?

BTW: my biggest complaint about the shootout is that there
is no specification for the tests. "About this test" just
isn't the same and isn't always filled in. I would like to see
for each test a *specification* section. 

There's a heap of tests in the Sandbox without specs. 
How can I contribute to an
experiment if I don't know what to implement?

I am willing to write the initial functional specs for tests that
don't have them and post them to the list for discussion.


-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
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