Re: [lmi] organization of XML actuarial tables

[Greg Chicares]

On 2012-04-26 15:30Z, Václav Slavík wrote:
> On 26 Apr 2012, at 03:11, Greg Chicares wrote:

[...arguments against an intrusive intermediate phase...]

> Just to be clear, I had a less intrusive intermediate phase in mind.
> The only code that would change would be actuarial_table.?pp, the rest
> would remain the same. actuarial_table implementation would change and
> would use XML data files instead of the binary ones. For example,
> actuarial_table("qx_ann.dat", 37) would load the table from qx_ann_37.xml
> (or using some other naming scheme). The idea was that this phase would
> replace tables storage format without affecting anything else, in API or
> user experience, and I thought it would make testing easier.

I see no objection to this "less intrusive intermediate phase".

> BTW, automatic exhaustive testing is easy in this phase: load all tables
> from XML and SOA in parallel, call specific_values() for all possible
> values, compare the results. It's ~10^4 specific_values() calls per table,
> that doesn't sound too bad. I plan to do this in any case, to satisfy
> myself that the XML code is correct.

Perfect. May I see your automatic-testing code when you've written it,
just to get another pair of eyes on it?

I don't think I've mentioned this important point: we actually use only
a few of the tables in the public 'qx_*' files. For example, 'qx_ins'
contains a table of mortality for Nottingham in the year 1793, which is
of interest only to historians. We can give you a list of the tables we
do use; when would you want that?