[SciPy-dev] Fwd: [sage-devel] numpy in SAGE, etc.

[Jonathan Guyer]

On Dec 8, 2006, at 10:32 AM, Alan G Isaac wrote:

> On Fri, 8 Dec 2006, Jonathan Guyer apparently wrote:
>> doctests (including our full example scripts)
>> cover all the things our old unittest suites did, and a great deal
>> more, and they're a lot easier to write, read, and maintain.
>
> Would you agree with the assessment here (at the bottom):
> http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/305292 ?

By and large, yes.

I'm aware of the arguments that unit tests should be separate from  
code, but I'm not really persuaded by that in practice. I think it's  
much more likely that separate tests will be completely out of date  
and irrelevant (whether or not they pass).

As far as

> A potential
> problem with doctest is that you may have so many tests that your
> docstrings would hinder rather than help understanding of your code
we do have a few cases of very pedantic testing that don't serve much  
use as documentation. For those, we put them in hidden _test*  
functions at the end of the code. They don't appear in our  
documentation, but they do get exercised. Putting them in a separate  
file would be OK, too.