Timofei Shatrov wrote: > But, you have to admit that it looks horrible (at least at the first glance). > If > there's some programming style that I absolutely can't stand, it would be the > one where programmer writes a huge block of commentary describing what a > function does, followed by one-liner of code
You Sir, are no fan of Literate Programming :-). > information in itself. With doctest it is even worse, because examples also > contain superfluous information. Everyone can just copy-paste the code in REPL > and see what happens when you execute it. And doctest automates such REPL tests. Like macros, don't knock it till you try it. > Besides that, there are many reasons > why tests should be stored in a separate file, or at least not in the same > function that they are testing. You need not have doctest as a part of source code. You can also create a separate documentation file that contains prose as well as tests intervening. http://www.python.org/doc/lib/doctest-simple-testfile.html Combine it with ReStructured Text and you have a wonderful documentation and testing solution in one place. Personally, I like this a lot better than Javadoc style documentation where usage examples are often absent. > Also Wikipedia article contains some "Cons of doctest" that look pretty nasty: Of course, doctest is hardly the ultimate testing solution. But it does an admirable job for many cases where you don't need to setup elaborate tests. > It's not surprising that no one uses this stuff for serious work. I have seen enough libraries that use doctest. Zope, Twisted and Paste are some of the popular Python projects in that use it. Epydoc supports it as well. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
