use Perl

I'm pleased to announce the third alpha release of TestSimple, the port of Test::Builder, Test::Simple, and Test::More to JavaScript. You can download it here. This release has the following changes:

• Removed trailing commas from 3 arrays, since IE6/Win doesn't like them. And now everything works in IE. Thanks to Marshall Roch for tracking down and nailing this problem.
• isNum() and isntNum() in TestBuilder.js now properly convert values to numbers using the global Number() function.
• CurrentTest is now properly initialized to 0 when creating a new TestBuilder object.
• Values passed to like() and unlike() that are not strings now always fail to match the regular expression.
• plan() now outputs better error messages.
• isDeeply() now works better with circular and repeating references.
• diag() is now smarter about converting objects to strings before outputting them.
• Changed isEq() and isntEq() to use simple equivalence checks (== and !=, respectively) instead of stringified comparisons, as the equivalence checks are more generally useful. Use cmpOk(got, "eq", expect) to explicitly compare stringified versions of values.
• TestBuilder.create() now properly returns a new TestBuilder object instead of the singleton.
• The useNumbers(), noHeader(), and noEnding() accessors will now properly assign a non-null value passed to them.
• The arrays returned from summary() and details() now have the appropriate structures.
• diag() now always properly adds a # character after newlines.
• Added output(), failureOutput(), todoOutput(), warnOutput(), and endOutput() to TestBuilder to set up function reference to which to send output for various purposes. The first three each default to document.write, while warnOutput() defaults to window.alert and endOutout() defaults to the appendData function of a text element inside an element with the ID test or, failing that, window.write.
• todo() and todoSkip() now properly add # after all newlines in their messages.
• Fixed line ending escapes in diagnostics to be platform-independent. Bug reported by Marshall Roch.
• Ported about a third of the tests from Test::Simple (which is how I caught most of the above issues). The remaining test from Test::Simple will be ported for the next release.

Many thanks to Marshall Roch for help debugging issues in IE.

Now, there is one outstanding issue I'd like to address before I would consider this production ready (aside from porting all the remaining tests from Test::Simple): how to harness the output. Harnessing breaks down into a number of issues:

How to run all tests in a single window. I might be able to write a build script that builds a single HTML file that includes all the other HTML files in iframes or some such. But then will each run in its own space without stomping on the others? And how would the harness pull in the results of each? It might be able to go into each of its children and grab the resultsfrom the TestBuilder objects...

More Feedback/advice/insults welcome!