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

Olemis Lang olemis at gmail.com
Mon May 20 18:37:53 CEST 2013 
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Olemis Lang <olemis at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 20 May 2013 11:33:42 -0500
Subject: Re: [Python-Dev] Purpose of Doctests [Was: Best practices for Enum]
To: Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net>

On 5/20/13, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 18 May 2013 23:41:59 -0700
> Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> We should continue to encourage users to make thorough unit tests
>> and to leave doctests for documentation.  That said, it should be
>> recognized that some testing is better than no testing.  And doctests
>> may be attractive in that regard because it is almost effortless to
>> cut-and-paste a snippet from the interactive prompt.  That isn't a
>> best practice, but it isn't a worst practice either.
>
> There are other reasons to hate doctest, such as the obnoxious
> error reporting.  Having to wade through ten pages of output to find
> what went wrong is no fun.
>

+1

FWIW , while using dutest [1]_ each interactive example will be a test
case and therefore the match for that particular assertion will be
reported using the usual unittest output format

.. [1] dutest
        (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/dutest)

-- 
Regards,

Olemis.

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http://issues.apache.org/bloodhound

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