[M3devel] m3cg.i3 reduction?

[Rodney M. Bates]

It is never realistic to try to thoroughly test a later (than the first) phase of
any compiler solely by pumping source code through the earlier phases.  Every
compiler I have ever worked on had tools to allow hand-coded input to later
phases, either already, or else I wrote one, if I had significant responsibility
for testing.  Sometimes it can be done with a plain old text editor, if the
intermediate stream is character-encoded.

Similarly, you need to be able dump the intermediate forms of output from earlier
phases in human-readable form.  Don't we already have at least some of this?

Jay K wrote:
> The backend interface has a few aspects that the frontend does not use.
> Implementations of these are therefore /extremely/ difficult to test and 
> therefore probably don't work.
> 
> 
>