On Sun, 28 Feb 2010, Igor Stasenko wrote:

On 28 February 2010 19:56, Levente Uzonyi leves@elte.hu wrote:

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On Sun, 28 Feb 2010, Jerome Peace wrote:

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Hi Levente,

Thank you for your suggestions.

I am not aiming myself at revising my tests. If you wish to add to them great. I suggest adding specific suggestions and code to the mantis report.

For some dictionaries "nil" has become a valid key. The tests in the report were designed for 3.9 - 3.10 where Dan Ingalls innocent suggestion that #= replace #==  caused a coder to break #comeFullyUpOnReload. I had to design a test that proved dictionaries we not getting hashed correctly just to prove somebody had caused a problem.

nil was always a valid key for Dictionary and IdentityDictionary. Sets were the collections which couldn't contain nil.

except WeakKeyDictionary, for obvious reason.

There are other exceptions, like MethodDictionary. I meant the classes here and not the hierarchy they represent.

Levente

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Levente

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The difficulty with dictionary problems is they appear like a will-of-the-wisp causing very hard to track down mischief. Trust me on this.

The problem may be recurring so its important to have tests IN THE IMAGE. That can be run to find them. For Identity dictionaries these test have proven to work if used. I haven't experimented with the new dictionary flavors or even with other dictionaries, just the one class.

The thing I am asking for help with is getting the test from change sets on a mantis report to live code in an image. I don't have any skill with MC. I am a Luddite with regards to it and have not taken the first steps to mastery. This suits me as a debugger. I can find, analyse, and patch bugs with the old methods. It leaves a gap in getting code committed. So I either need a book on MC for Luddites or someone to help by committing the code to resolve the issue. That's what I asked for.

Once the tests are where they can be used, improvements will be welcome. The existing tests are good enough to start with. Without something the image is likely to have bugs way to hard to chase.

More help in devising and PROVING tests that will find other problems is welcome. It was not the aim of my post however.

Cheers --Jer

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Levente Uzonyi leves at elte.hu Sun Feb 28 13:19:40 UTC 2010 replied to:

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On Sat, 27 Feb 2010, Jerome Peace wrote:

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Hi all,

I could use some help getting some crucial tests into trunk.

The patches are in the mantis report of the title. http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=6721

nil is a valid key in Dictionary and IdentityKeyDictionary. A better test would be something like this:

{ Dictionary. IdentityDictionary } do: [ :dictionaryClass |        dictionaryClass allInstancesDo: [ :dictionary |                dictionary keysAndValuesDo: [ :key :value |                        self assert: (dictionary at: key) == value ] ] ].

Or, if you want to use lower level (private) methods:

{ Dictionary. IdentityDictionary } do: [ :dictionaryClass |        dictionaryClass allInstancesDo: [ :dictionary |                dictionary array doWithIndex: [ :association :index |                        association ifNotNil: [                                self assert: (dictionary scanFor: association key) = index ] ] ] ]

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The ill hashed dictionaries have been detected in Fun Squeak.

The tests above can be used to track down dictionaries which have an invalid state.

Levente

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I am worried that there is something in the main image that causes conditions to occur so that dictionaries are not rehashed when needed.

The problem is that a mis-hashed dictionary will show up only as other symptoms. Code that seemingly doesn't work as expected. Without a ready test to run tracking it back to the true problem is difficult.

I have no MC skills so I am asking for someone to take over harvesting from the report.

Thank you in advance.

Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace

-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig.