On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 1:27 PM, Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> wrote:
This thread seems to be centered around making comparisons of results with indeterminate ordering (dicts being the prime example) work properly. In fact, one proposal was to have doctest call sorted on the output to make sure it's right, which was shot down because that's not always the correct thing to do.
Aahhh, that was me, and I didn't mean to shoot it down. The right modification would have been to typecheck for dict/set before you sort, and then format it like a string, IIRC. But at the time the function just returned a sorted object. In principle you can absolutely sort dict literals etc., but I don't think it's any easier to implement than just parsing them into dict objects and doing a direct dict comparison, so that's why I object to it. In addition, it's harder for the test writer, who now has to pay attention to ordering.
So the question is - why isn't dealing with this the responsibility of the test writer? Yeah, it's not quite the spirit of documentation to turn a dictionary into a sorted list in the output, but neither is littering the documentation with +LITERAL_EVAL and the like.
The thing about +LITERAL_EVAL and the other flags is that modern doctest-displaying tools like Sphinx hide the comments, so that you just see what looks like a regular interpreter session, without any # doctest: directives. Because of this, it's in principle possible to have "natural looking" things, in some cases. But yes, the status quo is that, somehow, you have to handle this explicitly yourself. -- Devin