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[Python-Dev] Purpose of Doctests [Was: Best practices for Enum]

Tres Seaver tseaver at palladion.com
Sun May 19 22:17:26 CEST 2013 
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On 05/19/2013 12:14 PM, Dan Stromberg wrote:
> On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 11:41 PM, Raymond Hettinger < 
> raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On May 14, 2013, at 9:39 AM, Gregory P. Smith <greg at krypto.org>
>> wrote:
>> 
>> Bad: doctests.
>> 
>> 
>> I'm hoping that core developers don't get caught-up in the "doctests
>> are bad meme".
>> 
> 
> Don't doctests intended for CPython not work on Jython, Pypy,
> IronPython...
> 
> I've been avoiding them for this reason.

"Naive" doctests depend a lot on repr, and hence tend to break even
between minor releases of CPython.  Folks who use a lot of them apply a
great deal of elbow grease to working around that problem, e.g. through
"renoormalizing" the output:

 https://github.com/zopefoundation/zope.testing/blob/master/src/zope/testing/renormalizing.txt


Tres.
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Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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