Re: BSD license problem of BiCon was non-issue

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs dot toronto dot edu>]

On Sat, 3 Apr 2004, ahmad khalifa wrote:

> so u both think that what i did was wrong ?
> enlighten me...

Depends on how do you define "wrong".  What you did is quite good
as a _prototype_, to be replaced by something better later.

Unfortunately I cannot access your code right now, as there is no
link from the arabeyes PuTTY page, nor from the sf.net page!
But lemme give an example:  your code has no optimizations and it
looks like an O(N^2) implementation.  You may say that the lines
are short in PuTTY, but IIRC you are keeping the minibidi
separate from PuTTY.

As another example, I'm not sure you fixed it or not, but you
used to only keep bidi types for Arabic block.

Or one really hard to find out technical one:  A PDF should pop
the *matching* LRE/RLE/LRO/RLO code, not the one on top of the
stack.  Now go find what does it mean ;).  [Hint:  the reference
impl. does this too, as well as FriBidi]

And you say your implementation is quite compliant to the spec,
but I see you can only say it because you have done absolutely no
systematic tests.  Lemme tell you how we tested FriBidi for
compliance:  compiled both FriBidi and the reference impl.  Then
wrote a few small scripts (they are in FriBidi CVS too) to
generate absolutely random strings of length 64kb, and feed to
both implementations, and compare the output.

This way could find any of my implementation errors in a matter
of seconds, giving a huge counter example, that I used to trim
down and find the bug.  Then I let the test process to run for 24
hours on my celeron machine, and only when it couldn't find any
offending string, I claimed that.

Ofcourse we have some static tests too, that you have seen.

> ak.

--behdad
  behdad.org