unittest vs py.test?

[bearophileHUGS at lycos.com]

Nigel Rowe>Have you seen Grig Gheorghiu's 3 part comparison of
unittest, and py.test?<

Very interesting articles, thank you. Testing seems something still in
quick development.

For small functions the doctests are useful, but py.test has some
advantages. Probably something even better that py.test can be
designed, taking some ideas from the doctests, or vice versa :-]
In py.test I see a couple of features useful for the Python language
too:

The raises:
py.test.raises(NameError, "self.alist.sort(int_compare)")
py.test.raises(ValueError, self.alist.remove, 6)
(A try can probably do something similar)

And the improved error messages:
"When it encounters a failed assertion, py.test prints the lines [3-4
lines?] in the method containing the assertion, up to and including the
failure. It also prints the actual and the expected values involved in
the failed assertion."

http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/01/python-unit-testing-part-3-pytest-tool.html

Such things can help avoid (just for simple situations/functions!)
testing frameworks in the first place, so you can use just the normal
Python code to test other code.

Bye,
Bearophile