663531 - selftest.as does not allow %%verify in helper methods

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Tamarin Graveyard :: Tools, defect)

Description

[Felix S. Klock II [:pnkfelix, :fklock]]

The way selftest.as is written, it forces helper methods to be written in a %%methods section separate from the series of %%test and %%explicit sections.

(I think you can put the helpers into %%prefix and perhaps %%decls too; the point is that you can't write helpers once you have started the %%test and %%explicit sections.)

But you can only write %%verify clauses once you've already started writing %%test and %%explicit sections.

This means you cannot write helper methods that capture common repeated %%verify patterns in the tests.

From what I can determine from inspecting the generated C++ code, there is no need for this constraint; the code generated for each %%verify does not include %%test-specific code.  It just includes the source file/line-number, and the source expression for the %%verify check.

One can work around this by having the helper method do all the checks it wants without using %%verify and return some bit of state indicating which one if any failed.  But this seems a bit baroque to me.