I do definitely support the idea of doctests for illustrative purposes.
However, as already mentioned, relying on them for the whole testing
framework is bad IMHO. Here are several reasons:
- random seeds are always the same
- impossible to have complicated test code
- impossible to tune the tests to make it more intensive (let say I
want to run the tests for 1000 inputs rather than 10)
- TESTS part are often unreadable
- `TestSuite(my_object).run()` is not illustrative
As underlined by Jeroen, our 100% coverage policy made some people do
copy-paste. As a consequence, some quite long doctests get executed
twice and makes `sage -tp --all` much slower.
I would suggest:
1) Change the guildelines to become "have 100% doctest coverage for
*public* methods/functions". We could even make it stronger by adding
"Test and document each function with each possible range of options.
Each code path (including errors) must be tested".
2) Introduce an alternative way of testing Sage code in the flavour of
unit tests (eg with python files in SAGE_ROOT/tests/) and move all the
content of the TESTS blocks into this framework.
Vincent
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