I am using declarative testing a lot and I found out why unit tests are so clunky. The reason why assertEquals(a,b) is used is because if we put `assert a==b` then nose can catch the AssertionError but wont find out what was returned or expected. This could be easily overcome if we allow oveloading == operator from outside. Right now == would have to be changed for every lefhand object that is compared in the tests, builtin types including. We could use a way to change it from above, so to speak. Consider this: def __glob_eq__(a,b): if not a == b: raise FoundInequalityError(a,b) return True assert obj1 == obj2 #<-- using eq above Nose could easily catch FoundInequalityError and print whatever assertEquals would. This goes very handy when you consider declarative unit testing that I use in my project. I have a unitest.TestCase derivative and the actual testcase has a method that yields individual comparisons, like this: class TestBinary(declarativeunittest.TestCase): def alltestsinteractive(self): yield [func(1) == 2] shuffle(alist) yield [sorted(alist) == [1,2,3]] Notice that this allows to put imperative statements in between declarative cases. So shuffled() is no longer necessary in this code. :) pozdrawiam, Arkadiusz Bulski