James_E

James_E

I see that the current ExUnit source code has support for rich failure messages on a small whitelist of “recognized” assertion patterns, namely:

  • assert match?(left, right), assert left = right
  • refute match?(left, right), refute left = right
  • assert left === right, refute left !== right,
  • assert left !== right, refute left === right,
  • assert left == right, refute left != right,
  • assert left != right, refute left == right,
  • assert left >= right, refute left < right,
  • assert left > right, refute left <= right
  • assert left <= right, refute left > right
  • assert left < right, refute left >= right
  • assert left ~= right
  • refute left ~= right

Would there be any interest in a pull request adding support for an additional pattern:

  • refute left and not right (implication, right must be true whenever left is)

This pattern is coming up repeatedly as the most robust, developer-intent-communicating form for some unittests I’m writing:

  property "delete returns a well-formed multiset whenever input is well-formed" do
    check all ms <- t(term(), strict: false),
          value <- term(),
          count <- one_of([non_negative_integer(), constant(:all)]) do
      result = One9.Ms.delete(ms, value, count)

      refute One9.Ms.well_formed?(ms) and not One9.Ms.well_formed?(result)
    end
  end
  property "put 0 copies doesn't corrupt struct" do
    check all multiset <- t(term()), value <- term() do
      result = One9.Multiset.put(multiset, value, 0)

      assert One9.Ms.well_formed?(result.counts)
      assert One9.Multiset.equals?(result, multiset)
      refute One9.Multiset.member?(result, value) and not One9.Multiset.member?(multiset, value)
    end
  end

And having these tests augmented with a little bit of extra verbiage and awesome debug formatting, like the comparison checks currently have, would be a minor boon.

First Post!

tfwright

tfwright

Personally, I think the most important value for test cases is simplicity, so I’m definitely skeptical about support for something like this.

FWIW, about the first example specifically I would argue that you should not be writing assertions against test inputs since they are supposed to be known. Granted I’m not familiar with the DSL shown so maybe I’m misunderstanding something but generally I would only expect the second part of that assertion to be a meaningful test since the former would be testing the test itself.

Most Liked

fuelen

fuelen

When guards are failing, boolean logic is highlighted with colours. I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be supported in ExUnit as well.

As @christhekeele has already suggested, please start a discussion on the core mailing list.

christhekeele

christhekeele

This seems like a reasonable conversation to start on the core mailing list, if you can’t find a prior discussion.

I think property-based testing and other test design philosophy is orthogonal to this discussion:

  • Elixir has special forms and operators
  • ExUnit tries to provide pretty formatting when recognizing some assertions on the language’s forms
  • Whether or not it can do better by recognizing some boolean operator combinations and formatting them specially is a conversation worth having
  • Regardless of testing practices

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