use Perl

Parrot 0.4.1 changes and news

- Installation: 'make install' is using standard locations now
(/usr/local is the default --prefix)
- Produce static and shared libraries on some systems
- Configure system rearragement
- OS pmc started (mkdir,cd,cwd,rm,umask,stat)
- Shootout examples
- Test files are now testable with 'prove'
- Smoke (and smokej) outputs progress
- PIR supports: I = A < B (>,<=,>=,==,!=)
- Add support for octal number constants
- partcl updates:
- almost finish [string]; start [file]
- add build tool for generating inline'd tcl builtins from templates.
- Jako updates: NCI, subroutines, global variables and constants all work.

It still tickles me that people find prove such a valuable tool. If you don't know what prove is, here are some slides from a lightning talk I did to tell you more.

Also, from prove --man:

PROVE VS. ``MAKE TEST''

prove has a number of advantages over make test when doing development.

• prove is designed as a development tool

• Perl users typically run the test harness through a makefile via make test. That's fine for module distributions, but it's suboptimal for a test/code/debug development cycle.

• prove is granular

• prove lets your run against only the files you want to check. Running prove t/live/ t/master.t checks every *.t in t/live, plus t/master.t.

• prove has an easy verbose mode

• prove has a -v option to see the raw output from the tests. To do this with make test, you must set HARNESS_VERBOSE=1 in the environment.

• prove can run under taint mode

• prove's -T runs your tests under perl -T, and -t runs them under perl -t.

• prove can shuffle tests

• You can use prove's --shuffle option to try to excite problems that don't show up when tests are run in the same order every time.

• prove doesn't rely on a make tool

• Not everyone wants to write a makefile, or use the ExtUtils::MakeMaker manpage to do so. prove has no external dependencies.

• Not everything is a module

• More and more users are using Perl's testing tools outside the context of a module distribution, and may not even use a makefile at all.