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