Michael Foord wrote:
Raymond Hettinger wrote:
From: "Ben Finney" <ben+python@benfinney.id.au>
Right, so I'm putting up a separate PEP just for the renaming. Should be arriving on this list soon.
I would like to work with you or someone else who is interested on an alternative PEP for a separate, simpler test module using the py.test syntax. That is much simpler to learn and use. Instead of self.assertIsNot and whatnot, you write: assert a is not b No need for tons of word-by-word spellings on things we already have syntax for. Almost anyone who has used py.test can attest its syntax is much more natural, easy to learn, easy to both read and write, and is much lighter weight. I think some variant of py.test could be done that is compatable with unittest and the did not have the "magic" present in earlier versions of py.test.
Ah, in my haste I skipped over your comment about "magic", my apologies. But in the absence of magic how do you propose to provide a meaningful error message from the failure of:
assert a == b
To wrap it in a function like "assert equals(a, b)" seems to gain little over unittest.
Aside from the question of providing nice error messages, two questions that immediately come to mind for me are: - how do I run my tests with -O or -OO? (since the compiler will throw all the assert statements away before any Python code gets a chance to look at them) - how do I test that code raises an expected exception? - how do I explicitly fail a test case? (e.g. I'll often do this when I want to test an operation with a variety of different inputs - I'll test for all of the inputs of interest, collecting the failures in a list, then reporting a single error message at the end detailing all of the cases that failed) And I've also never had any problem whatsoever debugging unit tests with print statements - one of the effects of the -v switch is to display anything which is written to stderr/stdout on the console again. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia --------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.boredomandlaziness.org