[Python-Dev] unittest's redundant assertions: asserts vs. failIf/Unlesses (original) (raw)

Steve Holden steve at holdenweb.com
Sun Jul 13 15:31:35 CEST 2008

Antoine Pitrou wrote:

Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam benfinney.id.au> writes:

That would better be written (preferring PEP 8 names) "failunlessequal". Which is still a double negative ("fail" and "unless" are both negative words). "Fail" isn't a negative. As Guido said, it's a description of the test behavior under particular circumstances. "fail_unless_equal" says quite clearly that the test requires equality of the values.

That's another reason to avoid "assert" in the name: these methods don't necessarily use the 'assert' statement. But all those constructs (assert, assertEqual, etc.) raise the same exception type named AssertionError which, if you care for naming consistency, is more important than whether or not they are implemented in terms of each other. :-) But the important behavior is the failure of the test, not the specific exception that is raised to fail it. Or would you prefer tests that raise other exceptions to succeed? The exception type is an implementation detail, and a fairly unimportant one as far as the purpose of testing goes.

regards Steve

Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/

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