2. Installation

QCheck is designed to work with various implementations of Standard ML. At the time of release, it was built successfully on the following systems:

• Standard ML of New Jersey v110.67 [built: Sat Mar 1 09:57:31 2008]
• Moscow ML compiler version 2.01 (January 2004)
• MLton 20070826 (built Thu Aug 30 11:53:36 2007 on fenrir.uchicago.edu)
• Poly/ML 5.1 Testing RTS version: I386-5.1

Inquiries and recommendations on improving compatibility are welcome. The following sections provide simple installation instructions for each system. A different Makefile is supplied for each system, but in all of them make all will produce the library and/or a test program, while make test will additionally run the test program. There is no make install, you must copy the files to an appropriate location by hand. All makefiles are currently dependent on GNU make.

2.1 SML/NJ

For Standard ML of New Jersey, the CM library specification ‘qcheck.cm’ should be all you need. The default target of make -f Makefile.nj will ask CM to build and stabilize this library. This creates a file ‘.cm/x86-unix/qcheck.cm’ (alter the arch/os tag as needed) which may be copied into the standard CM library path and added to the ‘pathconfig’.

If you have multiple installations of SML/NJ, you may specify which one to use by providing its path on the make command line, like this:

make -f Makefile.nj SML=~/nj49/bin/sml

2.2 Moscow ML

Building for Moscow ML is a little trickier; I benefitted enormously from the Mosmake system by Henning Makhlom. Typing

make -f Makefile.moscow

will generate a bunch of ‘.uo’ and ‘.ui’ files in the ‘src/’ directory. To use them in an interactive setting, give the path as a -I argument to mosml, like this:

% mosml -I src

load "QCheck";
 › > val it = () : unit
QCheck.pred;
 › > val 'a it = fn : ('a → bool) → 'a prop

Or, copy all the ‘.uo’ and ‘.ui’ files to a different directory, and load them from there.

Using the library in compiled programs is more complex. Mosmake will be a big help, but you will still need to figure out the dependencies to particular modules within QCheck. Moscow ML does not currently have a way to package together a set of object files into a single library.

In addition to the default target,

make -f Makefile.moscow all

creates a test program called ‘compose’ in the source directory, and the test target additionally runs the test. You may specify the location of the mosmlc compiler on the command line, in case the one you want to use is not first in your path:

make -f Makefile.moscow MOSMLC=~/mosml/bin/mosmlc

2.3 MLton

MLton is a whole-program compiler, so you cannot install QCheck as a library in the traditional sense. You may, however, compile its source code along with your own to produce test programs. The QCheck license (LGPL) permits incorporating the source even into proprietary programs.

The qcheck.cm file is intended to be readable by MLton as well as SML/NJ.

make -f Makefile.mlton all

will ask MLton to compile a test program called ‘tests/tests’. As always, the test target will run the test program. You may specify the path to the MLton compiler by setting the MLTON variable on the command line.

2.4 Poly/ML

QCheck will also work with Poly/ML. In this case, there is nothing to compile in advance, but PolyML.make will work if run from the ‘src/’ directory, like this:

OS.FileSys.chDir "src";
PolyML.make "QCheck";

See also the file ‘tests/polytest.sml’ for an example of how to use QCheck from Poly/ML. Running

make -f Makefile.poly test

will execute the unit tests for Poly/ML.

This document was generated by Chris League on April, 14 2008 using texi2html 1.78.