[Python-Dev] Purpose of Doctests [Was: Best practices for Enum] (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Mon May 20 16:45:31 CEST 2013

On Mon, 20 May 2013 15:57:35 +0200, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

On Mon, 20 May 2013 09:37:32 -0400 "R. David Murray" <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote: > On Mon, 20 May 2013 12:45:57 +0200, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote: > > On Sat, 18 May 2013 23:41:59 -0700 > > Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > > We should continue to encourage users to make thorough unit tests > > > and to leave doctests for documentation. That said, it should be > > > recognized that some testing is better than no testing. And doctests > > > may be attractive in that regard because it is almost effortless to > > > cut-and-paste a snippet from the interactive prompt. That isn't a > > > best practice, but it isn't a worst practice either. > > > > There are other reasons to hate doctest, such as the obnoxious > > error reporting. Having to wade through ten pages of output to find > > what went wrong is no fun. > > That's why I added the 'failfast' option to doctest.

I didn't know that. Is it propagated by regrtest? I never use doctest standalone.

I don't think so. That's a good idea, though.

> > Also the difficulty of editing them. For some reason, my editor doesn't > > offer me facilities to edit interactive prompt session snippets. > > I don't have much problem with lacking tailored facilities for this > in vim. I suppose that is a matter of personal style. I would like to > teach it the proper indentation, but I haven't been bothered enough yet > to do it. (After all, weren't you the one who told me the lack of tab > key indentation at the interactive prompt after you enabled completion > by default wasn't an issue because one could just use space to indent? :)

An interpreter prompt session is throwaway, so you can pretty much indent as you like (which may not be very pretty in a tests file). Besides, I was thinking about the prompts ('>>> ' and '... '), not the indentation itself.

True. I don't find typing >>> or ... very burdensome, though. Less even than fixing the alignment after hitting tab :)

--David

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