>> I'm hoping that core developers don't get caught-up in the "doctests are bad >> meme". >> >> Instead, we should be clear about their primary purpose which is to test >> the examples given in docstrings. >> In other words, doctests have a perfectly legitimate use case. > > But more than just one ;-) Another great use has nothing to do with > docstrings: using an entire file as "a doctest". This encourages > writing lots of text explaining what you're doing,. with snippets of > code interspersed to illustrate that the code really does behave in > the ways you've claimed.
+1, very true. I think doctest excel in almost every way above UnitTests. I don't understand the popularity of UnitTests, except perhaps for GUI testing which doctest can't handle. I think people just aren't very *imaginative* about how to create good doctests that are *also* good documentation. That serves two very good purposes in one. How can you beat that? The issues of teardown and setup are fixable and even more beautifully solved with doctests -- just use the lexical scoping of the program to determine the execution environment for the doctests. > picking-your-poison-ly y'rs - tim Cheers, Mark _______________________________________________ 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
