isAlphanum

[Alastair Reid]

> I've got an implementation of this module (and the other missing ones),
> but won't check in the changes until I've had a chance to test the code
> on a wider selection of machines/setups. 

This is maybe a good time to advertise the existence of a test suite for 
the Hugs distribution.

I recently revived the Yale Hugs test suite which 
checks error messages in Hugs, various parts of the runtime system, the
Prelude and standard libraries and the Hugs-GHC extensions.  (The test
suite is in the CVS repository - instructions for using it are in
the commit messages.)

The only problem is that Hugs has changed in the last 2-3 years and the 
test suite has stayed still.  This means there's no tests for new libraries,
no tests for new syntax and no tests for type system extensions.

What I'd like to see happen is for anyone contributing code (or who _has_ 
contributed code) to provide a small test for the code.

It'd also be a good idea for library maintainers whose library depends on 
some particular feature of Hugs to submit a (small) test which checks the
essence of the thing they depend on.  For example, the HGL (and, I think, Fran
and Yale's FRP code) depend on the producer-consumer pattern working in Hugs
and on exception handling working - so I added test cases for this.

btw The word "small" is important here.  The testsuite runs in 1-1.5 minutes on
my laptop.  If it was 10-15 minutes, I'd run it a lot less.

--
Alastair Reid

ps To run the test suite:

  cd hugs98/tests
  make -C ../src hugs   # make sure hugs is in hugs98/src
  sh testSuite static tcheck rts libs

  [You may have to reconfigure without --with-readline first.]

The output will be a bunch of lines preceeded by --!!!
Lines not preceded by --!!! are errors.
Errors are detected by comparing the actual output from Hugs with
 a file containing the expected output.  Errors are in the form of
 context diffs.