[Python-Dev] r87389 - in python/branches/py3k: Doc/library/unittest.rst Lib/unittest/case.py Misc/NEWS (original) (raw)

Raymond Hettinger raymond.hettinger at gmail.com
Sun Dec 19 20:55:55 CET 2010

On Dec 19, 2010, at 10:41 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 5:13 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

On Sat, 18 Dec 2010 20:23:49 -0800 Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

I may be unique, but I fear there is no great answer. On the one hand I almost always code it as e.g. assertEqual(actual, expected), which matches my preference for e.g. "if x == 5:" rather than "if 5 == x:". On the other hand in those assert* functions that show a nice diff of two lists, when reading such a diff my expectation is that "old, new" corresponds to "expected, actual". Which then freaks me out until I realize that I coded it as "actual, expected"... And yet "expected, actual" still looks weird to me. :-(

This could be nicely resolved by renaming the arguments "a" and "b", and having the diff display "a, b". It's quite natural (both the diff ordering and the arguments ordering), and they are consistent with each other. So 'a' stands for 'after' and 'b' for 'before', right? :-)

If you go down the a / b path instead of actual/expected, the diffs are straight-forward but some of the other output styles needed to be changed also (replace the messages for "unexpected" and "missing" elements to "things in a but not in b" and "things in b but not in a".

Raymond

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