[Python-Dev] PEP: Frequently-requested additional features for the unittest module (original) (raw)

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Wed Jul 16 04:29:26 CEST 2008

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 7:05 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:

Scott Dial <scott+python-dev at scottdial.com> writes:

Why [introduce redundant test names]?

assertnotlessthan = assertgreaterthanorequal assertnotgreaterthan = assertlessthanorequal assertnotlessthanorequal = assertgreaterthan assertnotgreaterthanorequal = assertlessthan To answer the question: The above tests are logically equivalent, but the failure message would be different, reporting failure in terms of what the caller wanted to test. I se your point though. I'd like to see what others think on this issue. Besides, assertnotgreaterthanorequal is god-awful-long, along with the complaints about PEP-8-ifying. I wonder if it would be better to abbreviate these names with the same name that was used for the attribute in the operator module. Let's not reinvent the wheel here.. Interesting. So you advocate collapsing the above eight tests into the following four: assertlt assertgt assertle assertge

Is any of this really necessary? Isn't this the equivalent of assert_(a < b)? It seems like the only thing you get out of this is a nicer error message, but assert_(a < b, 'not %r <= %s' % (a, b)) is not that complex. And do these cases really come up that often? I would want to see some numbers showing that these are really necessary (in both usage and people even specifying an error message in the first place).

-Brett

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