The testing of an APL compiler

Abstract

The testing of the APL-to-C compiler, COMPC, developed at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center consists of two components: a testing suite of 140 APL programs collected from various sources covering a variety of fields, and a unit-testing procedure which tests each primitive function on all possible subcases arising from different combinations of storage types and shapes. The second component, unit-testing, is an interesting example of the productivity APL can provide for software development. The unit-testing procedure is based on a workspace written in APL, and utilizes the □ FX feature of APL to dynamically create a test function from one of several templates. The running of both testing components is automated through the use of control programs written in the REXX procedures language under the VM/CMS operating system.