Exercise presentation - input and output variables to tests

Exercism
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Hi dear people,
I am having a hard time finding out, what the actual format of my output should be, but especially in what format the input variables are in.
I feel, in the current form, sometimes finding out about that is a more hard exercise, than the exercise itself. That is reading the test expressions and so on. And well, I guess that’s okay, but I also guess that some beginner could really really struggle with that.

So am I missing something completely?

A good example is the “Gigaseconds” exercise. I still have not found out, what the input variables format is…

I am doing the lua track.

Greetings :)

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Exercism uses a test driven development (TDD) model. It’s expected that you use/examine the tests to figure out what’s needed. You can either print/log/display/return the input data/metadata to examine and understand the input or you can read the test files directly.

The tests use os.time to craft the input. You can read the OS date time docs to understand what that returns and how to use it.

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Thanks.
Did I miss some guideline document where this expectation is explicitely expressed?

Also I can use return as a helper, but at least in the lua online editor using prints results in errors.

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Frequently asked questions | Exercism's Docs points to What is Test-Driven Development? | Exercism's Docs.

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