On Friday, 9 November 2012 at 07:29:28 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
On Friday, November 09, 2012 08:21:38 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
On 2012-11-09 07:20, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Well, unittests are a runtime check, and they don't
> *guarantee*
> anything. (One could, in theory, write a pathological
> pseudo-range that
> passes basic unittests but fail to behave like a range in
> some obscure
> corner case. Transient ranges would fall under that
> category, should we
> decide not to admit them as valid ranges. :-))
>
> But of course that's just splitting hairs.
But since we do have a language with static typing we can at
least do
our best to try at catch as many errors as possible at compile
time. We
don't want to end up as a dynamic language and testing for
types in the
unit tests.
But the types are already tested by the templat constraints and
the fact that
they compile at all. It's the functions' runtime behaviors that
can't be
tested, and no language can really test that at compile time,
whereas unit
test _do_ test the runtime behavior. So, you get both static
and dynamic
checks.
I guess some runtime behavior could actually be tested at compile
time using CTFE?
int doubleMe(int a) { return 2 * a }
static test = doubleMe(3);
static assert(test == 6);
But maybe that is splittin' hares as well :)
/Jonas
