[Python-Dev] How far to go with user-friendliness

[Ethan Furman]

On 07/14/2015 02:53 PM, Robert Collins wrote:
> On 15 July 2015 at 09:41, A.M. Kuchling <amk at amk.ca> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 09:53:33AM -0700, Ethan Furman wrote:
>>> Part of writing tests is making sure they fail (and for the right reason) -- proper testing of the tests would reveal such a typo.
>>
>> And there are other failure modes for writing tests that succeed but
>> are not testing what you think.  For example, you might re-use the
>> same method name:
>>
>>     def test_connection(self):
>>         # Never executed
>>         ...
>>
>>     ... 200 lines and 10 other test methods later ...
>>
>>     def test_connection(self):
>>         ...
>>
>> Or misuse assertRaises:
>>
>>     with self.assertRaises(TypeError):
>>         1 + "a"
>>         # Second statement never reached
>>         [] + 'b'
>>
>> I don't think unittest can protect its users from such things.
>
> It can't, but there is a sliding scale of API usability, and we should
> try to be up the good end of that :).

I hope you're not suggesting that supporting misspellings, and thereby ruling out the proper use of an otherwise fine variable name, is at the good end of that scale?

--
~Ethan~