[Zope-dev] Re: zope.sendmail Retry fixes and new state machine.

[Andreas Jung]

--On 10. März 2008 22:33:13 -0500 Stephan Richter 
<srichter at 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 
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