--On 10. März 2008 22:33:13 -0500 Stephan Richter <srichter@cosmos.phy.tufts.edu> wrote:
On Monday 10 March 2008, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
Indeed, and for that reason this can't be said enough. Doctests are useful to create testable documentation. They are not the right tool to create isolated, debuggable tests.
Huh? I totally disagree. If you cannot explain your software in words, you do not understand it. As there are different kinds of programmatic tests, you can easily write different levels of doctests that have different audiences.
This sounds like writing doctests just for sake of having doctests for all and everything. I completely disagree with that. In complex algorithms edgecases are often only of interest for the person implementing the code in order for having a safety belt. For writing good doctests you have to be a good (English) writer at some point. Doctests come into the game if you want to tell other people about the usage of your module. It's basically not of interest for telling them all edgecases. Addressing edgecase is unittests is basically good enough for me. They sometime require more code to test and put this into a doctest is often just overhead. Andreas