[Python-ideas] doctest

[Mark Janssen]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 9:50 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> Really? Not in my experience, although I admit I haven't tried to push the
> envelope too far.
>
> But I haven't had any problem with a literate programming model:
>
> * Use short, self-contained but not necessarily exhaustive examples in the
> code's docstrings (I don't try to give examples of *every* combination of
> good and bad data, special cases, etc. in the docstring).
>
> * Write extensive (ideally exhaustive) examples with explanatory text, in a
> separate text file.

Hmmm, interesting.  I generally like to keep it all in one file and
define a dummy "test" function that just contains doctest code so that
it can be all kept in one file and in-sync.

> If my tests require setting up and tearing down
> resources, I stick to unittest which has better setup/teardown support. (It
> would be hard to have *less* support for setup and teardown than doctest.)

If doctest had context-scoping, I think it would be superior to
unittest.  SetUp functionality would be contained in the class
definition's __doc__, or out in the module's own __doc__.  If any
teardown functionality was necessary in the class's code a dummy
teardown method could be defined at the end of the class definition.
(Not as ideal as a more integrated test-driven development approach,
but likely acceptable...)

mark