Non-deterministic behaviour in a specification can be a headache for testing. This updated post explores the non-determinism in the JSONPath RFC 9535, describes how the Compliance Test Suite is being upgraded to deal with non-determinism, and shows how non-deterministic tests can be generated automatically. There's also an "explosive" challenge for Haskell programmers.
Found a couple of trivial optimisations of my Haskell code which sped it up by a factor of over 20,000 (for the "explosive" example mentioned in the above post). That's sufficient for now. 😉
@FenTiger Ok, to expand on "fire, aim, ready", the idea is to knock up some code in order to explore the problem space. This can (some would say must) then be discarded, and you can then probably start coding proper by writing tests.
One difficulty with skipping step 1 (as in strict TDD) is that it assumes initial understanding sufficient to write a test.
But I agree step 1 should usually be skipped when you're developing something similar to what you've seen before.
@iwein@FenTiger My preference is to write obviously correct code from the start. Once my code gets messy, I get bogged down. But sometimes you have to start further back, with a mess, and chuck that away as soon as possible.
(Context: a good friend suggested I optimise my Haskell code by algebraically pushing a filter through the implementation of permutations. When I saw the implementation, I found an alternative. 😱)
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