[Python-Dev] PEP: Consolidating names and classes in the unittest module (updated 2008-07-15) (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Jul 16 12:21:21 CEST 2008

Ben Finney writes:

This "fail is a negative word" has already been rebutted, by native speakers of English.

Not successfully, it hasn't. Steven d'Aprano describes one style of testing as "the test passes if it fails to fail in each of a sequence of cases." That is perfectly good English, which makes no sense if "fail" completely lacks the semantics of negation. The intuition that "fail" is a negative word is thus well-founded in standard usage.

By the way, a native speaker is a person who has no need to understand how his language works; he just uses it. Being a native speaker doesn't qualify one as an authority on her language.

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