Addition of unit testing framework to the language

[Lucretia]

I couldn't find anything by searching to see if anyone had suggested adding this.

This is something newer languages like Zig have included into the language and could be useful for Ada to have a standard testing framework built in, possibly using aspects.

[sttaft]

Ada allows you to write a child package called, say, "Blah.Tests", and write as many tests as you want there. There are also some widely available frameworks such as "AUnit". Can you give some examples of what a standard testing framework would add over and above these capabilities?

[Lucretia]

AUnit isn't part of the standard or the language, that's what I'm getting at here. A consistent standard way to do things across the language.

[sttaft]

One issue is that testing frameworks can always become more and more elaborate over time. It is unclear that standardizing on one snapshot of some existing framework would be appropriate. However, if there were some special attribute or aspect or pragma that could help in defining a testing framework, that would be interesting.

One example might be GNAT's "Debug" pragma, or the notion of "Ghost" code in SPARK and other formally-verifiable languages. The ARG has discussed the idea of generalizing "Ghost" code in the past, but did not settle on an approach. SPARK has recently investigated the notion of multiple levels of Ghost code, so that would be interesting to consider in this context.