Test Data Gone?

[Doug Ewell]

Steven R. Loomis wrote:

>> At the time we retracted it, it didn't appear that there was a lot of
>> usage, and you really get a much more thorough test by comparing to
>> ICU's implementation.
>
> Right. An idea at IUC was rather than trying to scope test data as
> cldr conformance test data, to have a new effort that simply and
> explicitly records ICU's result  for a certain Icu/cldr version
> somewhere for certain input values and certain formatting routines.
> People are doing this already, just combine efforts. 
>
> Maybe the results would be an Icu-maintained file  instead of cldr,
> like a sample app. 

I've always been uncomfortable with the idea, which has been expressed
from time to time, that CLDR is merely a data format for ICU, instead of
being generally usable by applications and libraries that have nothing
to do with ICU.

Mark and Markus will recall that I expressed similar discomfort back in
2002, when BOCU-1 was specified in terms of ICU-based "sample" code
instead of an actual specification, and when the conformance test was
"make sure your implementation generates the same output as the sample
code."

--
Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO ����