Integrated Testing - Peppable?

[John Roth]

<carl.manaster at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1107373949.960435.212020 at z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> Hi,
>
> Please excuse the intrusion from an admirer, but not a user, of Python.
>
> I've got an idea that I think could improve the language and might be
> relatively simple to implement.  I've developed a prototype with a toy
> language here: <https://sourceforge.net/projects/zbt/>, with screenshot
> here: <https://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=130278>
>
> The idea is that if the language had testing built into it, editors
> could take advantage of that to highlight, not by syntax, but by
> correctness (as defined by the tests).  As a side effect, coverage
> coloring is also possible.
>
> So far, I see the need for three keywords: "expect", "returns", and
> "archetype".  "expect" and "returns" get used together, as an
> expression of what the function should return, given certain inputs.
> "archetype" would define edit-type instantiable objects that could be
> used in the tests.  The biggest lack at present is support for void
> functions.
>
> So...  Should I turn this into a PEP?

I'd say no, for a couple of reasons. One is that there
are Eclipse plugins that do this for JUnit; they don't
require any changes to Java in order to function. They
just require JUnit, which is pretty ubuquitous.

Second, is that the IDEs aren't part of Python proper.

Outside of that, it's might be quite a good idea to
do something similar with unittest, doctest or py.test.

John Roth

>
> Peace,
> --Carl
>