[Shootout-list] Ray tracer

[John Skaller]

On Sun, 2005-06-19 at 20:25 +0300, Einar Karttunen wrote:

> When copying a solution from an another language the usual reason is
> that the test lacks a good description 

Excuse me for falling over laughing. The Shootout has a major
flaw that there is no clear test specification. I found this
really strange when I first started writing tests, there
was just an 'about this test' piece of waffle which sometimes
had some kind of specification.

In the newer Shootout setup, Isaac has partly solved this
problem with 'do it the same way as this Java program'.

Whilst I think this is a bad idea, since it is impossible
to make rational decisions about what 'same way' means,
one can at least deduce that the result should be the same,
so at least in that light there is now at least a specification
which can be used to formally exclude certain 
*incorrect* implementations.

The problem is that this only allows a formal negative
judgment. If the words are changed to 'the same thing'
then there is a formal decision algorithm which
can make both positive and negative judgments deterministically.

-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sourceforge dot net>
Download Felix: http://felix.sf.net