[Numpy-discussion] Doctest items

[Robert Kern]

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 17:50, Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 1:41 PM, Pauli Virtanen <pav at iki.fi> wrote:
>
>> But it's a custom tweak to doctest, so it might break at some point in
>> the future, and I don't love the monkeypatching here...
>
> Welcome to the joys of extending doctest/unittest.  They hardcoded so
> much stuff in there that the only way to reuse that code is by
> copy/paste/monkeypatch.  It's absolutely atrocious.
>
>>> We could always just make the plotting section one of those "it's just
>>> an example not a doctest" things and remove the ">>>" (since it doesn't
>>> appear to provide any useful test coverage or anything).
>>
>> If possible, I'd like other possibilities be considered first before
>> jumping this route. I think it would be nice to retain the ability to run
>> also the matplotlib examples as (optional) doctests, to make sure also
>> they execute correctly. Also, using two different markups in the
>> documentation to work around a shortcoming of doctest is IMHO not very
>> elegant.
>
> How about a much simpler approach?  Just pre-populate the globals dict
> where doctest executes with an object called 'plt' that basically does
>
> def noop(*a,**k): pass
>
> class dummy():
>  def __getattr__(self,k): return noop
>
> plt = dummy()
>
> This would ensure that all calls to plt.anything() silently succeed in
> the doctests.  Granted, we're not testing matplotlib, but it has the
> benefit of simplicity and of letting us keep consistent formatting,
> and examples that *users* can still paste into their sessions where
> plt refers to the real matplotlib.

It's actually easier for users to paste the non-doctestable examples
since they don't have the >>> markers and any stdout the examples
produce as a byproduct.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless
enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as
though it had an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco