Helping to find the usefulness of a proposal

[Joe Darcy]

Mark Mahieu wrote:
> 2009/4/2 Joe Darcy <Joe.Darcy at sun.com <mailto:Joe.Darcy at sun.com>>
> 
>     Given the relative scarcity of prototypes, to say nothing of prototypes
>     with a thorough test suite, we can at best make informed estimates of
>     the difficulty of various changes, but I'm certain there will be
>     surprises down the line, as there were for every JDK 5 language change.
> 
> 
> I'd certainly like to see more prototypes, personally; I find them 
> extremely useful for getting to the details of a proposal.

Yes; they can help in writing the specification too :-)

> However, is there any value in people building test suites even if they 
> can't put together an actual prototype to test them with?  I think there 
> may be.

I was more so thinking of regression style testing in conjunction with 
developing a prototype, but having a limited number of independent tests 
might help too.

-Joe