greg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > E.g. your program might pass its test and run properly for years > > before some weird piece of input data causes some regexp to not quite > > work. > > Then you get a bug report, you fix it, and you add a test > for it so that particular bug can't happen again.
Why on earth would anyone prefer taking a failure in the field over having a static type check make that particular failure impossible? > > Once I got the function to work, I deployed it without writing > > permanent tests for it. > > That suggests you had a temporary test at some point. I ran the function on real, dynamic data and made sure the results were right. > So, keep it and make it a permanent test. Even if it's just a small > manually-created directory, it's still better than nothing, and you > can add to it over time to cover any bugs that turn up. That doesn't obviously fit into the doctest framework; such a test would be considerably more complex than the function itself, and the types of situations that I could imagine causing failures wouldn't be included in a test like that. Basically I had to get on to the next thing. Given the somewhat throwaway nature of this particular code, nothing else really made sense. But I think I'm going to look into using dejagnu for more heavyweight testing of some other parts of the program, so I guess some good came out of discussing this issue. Thanks. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
