TADS Testers’ Toolkit Beta

Technical Development Interpreters
1

The TADS Testers’ Toolkit (TTT) is a TADS 3 library containing a collection of authors’ toys with pretentions of being useful tools. How useful? The only way to find out is to put the toolkit in the hands of some TADS 3 authors for beta-testing (beta-authoring?) and see how well it works for them. With the toolkit an author can:

  • Type a simple command (‘>list’) right in the interpreter to generate a neatly formatted list of supported commands, ala:

    get (dobj)
    get off of (dobj)
    eat (dobj)
    throw (dobj) at (iobj)
    .
    .
    .
    The lists are dynamically generated from the actual predicate objects, meaning that they will automatically include any custom commands defined by a project or its included libraries.

  • Generate similar lists of Things, Topics, Directions, etc.

  • Type another simple command (‘>test’) to automatically try all commands on a single Thing (without having to type out each command separately), or a single command on all Things. Just like with the lists above, custom commands are automatically included in the test.

  • Write flexible test scripts. For example, you could record:
    *>ask (dobj) about chocolate
    *>tell (dobj) about chocolate
    and then type:

    replay “myTalkScript.cmd” with Charlie
    replay “myTalkScript.cmd” with Grandpa
    to do basic conversation testing on each of your Actors in turn - without ever having to leave the interpreter window.

  • Execute a totally random, but syntactically valid, command. Execute a dozen random commands and laugh at how crazy some can be!

  • And more!

The purpose of this toolkit is to make interpreter-assisted testing easier and more effective for TADS authors. (Well, that and give me an excuse to write TADS 3 code :wink: However, there is also the possibility that it will backfire. Authors might find themselves grinding their teeth and pulling their hair, trying to solve a bug in their code that isn’t really there - because it in the testing tools. I need the help of some brave and generous TADS authors to beta-test the toolkit and find out whether it’s more of a help or a hindrance.

If you’re interested, please contact me at ttt.author@gmail.com.

2

Per your request, I did send an e-mail to you. I’ll just reiterate here that what you’ve developed may actually factor in very well for a set of classes that I’m currently writing material for. These classes are exclusively TADS 3 and will be focused on effective ways to use TADS, beyond just being able to write textual IF with it.

I’m most definitely interested in seeing what you have here.