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Postings from August 2001
On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 02:12:46PM +0100, Robin Houston wrote:
> Michael Schwern wrote:
> > Ah HA! I've been wondering why nobody ever thinks to write a simple
> > ok() function for their tests! perlhack has bad testing advice.
>
> Could you explain the advantage of having a "simple ok() function"?
Because writing:
print "not " unless some thing worked;
print "ok $test\n"; $test++;
gets rapidly annoying. This is why we made up subroutines in the
first place. It also looks like hell and obscures the real purpose.
Besides, that will cause problems on VMS.
> As somebody who has spent many painful hours debugging test failures,
> I'm intimately familiar with the _disadvantages_. When you run the
> test, you know that "test 113 failed". That's all you know, in general.
Second advantage is you can easily upgrade the ok() function to fix
this, either by slapping this line in:
printf "# Failed test at line %d\n", (caller)[2];
or simply junking the whole thing and switching to Test::Simple or
Test::More, which does all sorts of nice diagnostics-on-failure for
you. It's ok() function is backwards compatible with the above.
There's some issues with using Test::Simple to test really basic Perl
functionality, you have to choose on a per test basis. Since
Test::Simple doesn't use pack() it's safe for t/op/pack.t to use
Test::Simple. I just didn't want to make the perlhack patching
example too complicated.
> One compromise would be to use a test-generating script, which allows
> the tests to be structured simply and _generates_ the actual test
> code. One could then grep the generated test script to locate the
> failing code.
This is a very interesting, and very common, response to the problem.
I'm going to make some observations about reactions to testing,
they're not specific to you.
If you've ever read the Bastard Operator From Hell series, you'll
recall the Dummy Mode.
The words "power surging" and "drivers" have got her. People hear
words like that and go into Dummy Mode and do ANYTHING you say. I
could tell her to run naked across campus with a powercord rammed
up her backside and she'd probably do it... Hmmm...
There seems to be a Dummy Mode WRT testing. An otherwise competent
person goes to write a test and they suddenly forget all basic
programming practice.
The reasons for using an ok() function above are the same reasons to
use functions in general, we should all know them. We'd laugh our
heads off at code that repeated as much as your average test does.
These are newbie mistakes.
And the normal 'can do' flair seems to disappear. I know Robin. I
*know* that in any other situation he would have come up with the
caller() trick in about 15 seconds flat. Instead weird, elaborate,
inelegant hacks are thought up to solve the simplest problems.
I guess there are certain programming idioms that are foreign enough
to throw your brain into reverse if you're not ready for them. Like
trying to think in Lisp, for example. Or being presented with OO for
the first time. I guess writing test is one of those.
--
Michael G. Schwern <schwern@pobox.com> http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/
Perl6 Quality Assurance <perl-qa@perl.org> Kwalitee Is Job One
Maybe they hooked you up with one of those ass-making magazines.
-- brian d. foy as misheard by Michael G Schwern