On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 03:56:02PM +0200, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
On 4/19/10 15:48 , Marius Gedminas wrote:
def doctest_MyClass_bar(): """Test MyClass.bar
>>> y = MyClass()
The bar method peforms a bar calculation that typically returns twenty-three:
>>> y.bar() 23
"""
What is the advantage of that over:
def test_something(self): # Test MyClass.bar
y=MyClass()
*cringe* Sorry, I've this reflex to cringe every time I see a PEP-8 violation.
# The bar method peforms a bar calculation that typically # returns 23.
self.assertEqual(y.bar(), 23)
It reads the same, and as a bonus you can step through it with pdb and syntax highlighting works normally in most editors.
The "advantage" is that I've rarely seen comments in unit tests and personally I never felt compelled to write a comment when writing a unit test. A doctest without any text preceding a >>> line feels Wrong(TM) to me, and, judging from our test suite, the other programmers on my team. Whether that advantage is worth the multitude of disadvantages of doctest-for-unit-testing is a different question. Over the years my opinion slowly changed from "probably" to "rarely". Marius Gedminas -- http://pov.lt/ -- Zope 3 consulting and development