On Feb 27, 2012, at 08:35 PM, Michael Foord wrote:
The problem of being dependent on order of unorderable types (actually very difficult to solve).
Actually, not so much, only because IME, I find that I rarely want to just dump the repr of such objects. That's usually going to be hard to read even if the output were sorted. Instead, I very often iterate over the items (in sorted order of course), and use ellipses to ignore the lines (i.e. items) I don't care about. In practice, I haven't found this one to be so bad.
Things like shared fixtures and mocking become *harder* (although by no means impossible) in a doctest environment.
Not if you use separate DocFileSuites.
Another thing I dislike is that it encourages a "test last" approach, as by far the easiest way of generating doctests is to copy and paste from the interactive interpreter. The alternative is lots of annoying typing of '>>>' and '...', and as you're editing text and not code IDE support tends to be worse (although this is a tooling issue and not a problem with doctest itself).
Actually, Emacs users should use rst-mode, which has no so bad support for separate file doctests. Of course, the mode is useful for reST documentation even if your documentation is untested <wink>. -Barry