Finding differences

Here is another example that shows that testing is useful. I had implemented the type-juggling from Integer- to String-value and written some tests for this. All the tests succeeded on my machine so I could commit. I was surprised when I got a mail about a failing build. If you look at the page then you will notice that the check passed for i686-linux, but failed for i686-darwin. The tests that fail have in common that they handle a non-empty string that does not start with a number. Thus my code applied string-to-int to an empty string. This strategy is implemented in C and calls strtol. It turns out that the result of this function is not the same for both platforms if the input is an empty-string. I am not a C-expert, but i686-darwin seems to give an error and i686-linux does not do this. The problem is solved and tests are added to the Stratego-libraries for this. But it might be useful to know for others.

These implementation details might be interesting for some, others prefer an update. So what has been added to PHP-SAT? It is now possible to include files in a simple way. This means that all files are included without looking at the context. They can only be included if the file names are coded in Strings, so no concatenation. They should also be on the include-path. But this is the same for PHP.

It is also possible to print the included files. All files are printed to a file with the same file name and a post-fix '.psat'. The bug patterns within PHP-SAT are also applied to the included files, so these are checked automatically.

I am currently improving the simple evaluation to be able to handle more complex file inclusion. It should also improve file-inclusion by having the normal semantics for include_- and require_once.

The last cool thing is that almost all calls to the stratego-xtc-library are gone. This means that we could make windows-builds soon!