Writing Test Scripts
As with the rest of HATE, test scripts are written in the Tcl programming language. However, writing a test
script does not require an in-depth knowledge of Tcl; reading through
the following guidelines and looking at an example should be enough to get you
going.
A well-formed test script comprises two procedures:
- HATE_DescribeTests writes out a short description (using
HATE_Line to output each line) of the tests contained in the
script.
- HATE_RunTests is used by HATE to actually run the tests.
It should consist of a series of invocations of the routine
HATE_Test, one for each test. The normal Tcl looping and
conditional constructs may be used if required.
Each invocation of HATE_Test should pass the following
four arguments:
- the test name, a unique identifier for this particular
test; this is used in the production of verbose output
- a value that indicates whether the test is expected to succeed
or fail; the values 1 and 0 are normally used
for success and failure respectively
- the input to the test program
- the expected output from the test program
Adrian F. Clark
VASE Laboratory
Electronic Systems Engineering
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK
Email: alien@essex.ac.uk