Oz Language Track

Exercism
1

I’m interested in developing a track for the Oz programming language. The language is used to explore different computation models in the fascinating book CTMCP. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much interest in the language. Is there some minimum threshold of popularity to justify a new language track?

2

I believe there’s just needs to be someone willing to build and maintain the track.

3

Thanks Isaac. I’ll take a look at that.

4

I would be happy to contribute a dozen practice exercise PRs.

5

Thanks @keiraville Can you elaborate what that entails?

6

Add initial exercises | Exercism's Docs covers that bit, but it’ll be a bit later. For now, I’d focus on choosing a testing framework if one exists. Tracks that don’t have one readily available tend to roll their own testing setup, and we have a few examples of those. At that point, the staff likes to see a sample implementation of the Hello World exercise along with the test suite. You can find an overview of what needs to be done for that part at Add the first exercise | Exercism's Docs.

7

I’m afraid that I’m in that position with Oz. I discovered an old, rudimentary testing project, but there is certainly no “standard” framework. I’ve contacted one of the language designers, so maybe he will have something I can use. In the meantime I’m looking at how the Common Lisp track uses fiveam for testing. Thanks for the links.

8

If you want to go the DIY route, you have to overcome two major challenges:

  • Take the basic test runner template and get your language running in a suitable docker container.
  • Write a script, that runs the user-submitted files and saves the results in a json file.

Keep in mind, that exercism has to pay according to the size of your final docker container image. 1 gb is about 1k $ per year if I remember correctly.

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9

To be clear, we aren’t saying to build the test runner first, but it’d would helpful to see a mockup of the potential test suite for hello-world. If we go forward with the track, then you can start building it in earnest following The Test Runner Interface | Exercism's Docs. I’m sure community members will be happy to help out however they can at that stage and onwards.

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