On Mar 4, 2010, at 4:01 AM, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
Jason Grout wrote:
On 03/04/2010 04:07 AM, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
Anyway, it seems my view is a minority one here.
I don't think that's necessarily the case (I agree with you that
randomized testing is a good thing). However, I also agree with
others that writing doctests is more important for those that feel
like they can write doctests. For example, I just wrote a lot of
doctests for RealField (i.e., code that I did not write) and found
lots of corner cases that were not handled correctly. I feel like
that was more valuable than writing randomized doctests comparing
results to mathematica.
Fair enough. Clearly knowledge of corner cases is important here.
And even better (though harder) would be randomized generation of
corner cases (like mpz_rrandomb) :)
What concerns me about some of the doc tests I've seen, is that the
"Expected" value seems to be whatever someone got on their computer.
There is no justification for that result. It might be berried in
some trac ticket (if so it's not referenced). To me, such tests are
not very good.
+1. Referees should be checking that the tests are good, not just that
they exist and pass.
- Robert
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