[M3devel] m3cg.i3 reduction?

[Tony Hosking]

On 8 Mar 2010, at 12:42, Rodney M. Bates wrote:

> 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.

Indeed.

> 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?

Yes, m3cgcat and friends...

> 
> 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.
>>