I may be unique, but I fear there is no great answer. On the one hand I almost always code it as e.g. assertEqual(actual, expected), which matches my preference for e.g. "if x == 5:" rather than "if 5 == x:". On the other hand in those assert* functions that show a nice diff of two lists, when reading such a diff my expectation is that "old, new" corresponds to "expected, actual". Which then freaks me out until I realize that I coded it as "actual, expected"... And yet "expected, actual" still looks weird to me. :-(
On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> wrote: > On 12/18/2010 3:48 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote: >> >> On Sat, 18 Dec 2010 21:00:04 +0100 (CET) >> ezio.melotti<python-check...@python.org> wrote: >>> >>> Author: ezio.melotti >>> Date: Sat Dec 18 21:00:04 2010 >>> New Revision: 87389 >>> >>> Log: >>> #10573: use actual/expected consistently in unittest methods. > > Change was requested by M. Foord and R. Hettinger (and G.Brandl for b2). > >> IMHO, this should be reverted. The API currently doesn't treat these >> arguments differently, so they should really be labeled "first" and >> "second". Otherwise, the user will wrongly assume that the signature is >> asymmetric and that they should be careful about which order they pass >> the arguments in. > > The error report on assert failure *is* often asymmetrical ;=). > From Michael's post: > "This is particularly relevant for the methods that produce 'diffed' output > on failure - as the order determines whether mismatched items are missing > from the expected or additional to the expected." > > This change struck me as a nice bit of polishing. > > -- > Terry Jan Reedy > > _______________________________________________ > Python-Dev mailing list > Python-Dev@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev > Unsubscribe: > http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/guido%40python.org > -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
