[Python-Dev] on Python's tests (and making them better) (original) (raw)

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Sat Jun 7 05:24:21 CEST 2008

On Sat, 7 Jun 2008 07:32:40 am Martin v. Löwis wrote:

Flat is better than nested, and adding hierarchy will make it more difficult to find anything (except perhaps for the one person who did the rearrangement).

Do you have a filing cabinet with everything filed under "F" for File? wink

I've often thought that "Flat is better than nested" was one of the weaker Zens... often good advice, but nearly as often not. Lists of lists and binary trees can be useful. If you've ever used an operating system with a flat file system (and I have) you'll know what a pain it is dealing with the lack of hierarchical directories.

I personally use grep to find the place where to add a new test.

I think, and this is just my opinion, that if you are forced to do a linear search through the entire test suite in order to find the file you want, that perhaps the test suite needs a tad better organisation.

-- Steven

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list