[Python-Dev] PEP: Consolidating names in the unittest module (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Jul 16 00:13:22 CEST 2008

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 3:20 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

> * Positive admonition: The assert* names state the intent of how > the code under test should behave, while the fail* names are > phrased in terms of how the code should not behave.

FWIW, I think these are fairly stated. So fairly that I'm surprised you haven't been persuaded! Nitpick: the second point is not just "precedent", there's an economic reason there too. Tests in the standard distribution which use the deprecated style will need to be converted. Steven d'Aprano claims this is nontrivial (and thus error- prone) in some cases. I haven't seen that claim denied, and it seems plausible to me.

I'd like to see examples of that (this would be Steven's task if he's serious about his assertion). Since the fail and assert names are mapped to each other using aliasing I don't see how it could be nontrivial to map e.g. self.failIf(x) to self.assertFalse(x) -- these are the same function!

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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