On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 2:25 AM, Luca Cerone <luca.cer...@gmail.com> wrote: > The difference is that in that case you want to check whether the result is > correct or not, because you expect a certain result. > > In my case, I don't know what the output is, nor care for the purpose of the > tutorial. What I care is being sure that the command in the tutorial is > correct, and up to date with the code.
I'd call that a smoke-test, rather than something a test harness/engine should be doing normally. All you do is see if the program crashes. This can be extremely useful (I smoke-test my scripts as part of my one-key "deploy to testbox" script, saving me the trouble of actually running anything - simple syntactic errors or misspelled function/variable names (in languages where that's a concept) get caught really early); but if you're using this for a tutorial, you risk creating a breed of novice programmers who believe their first priority is to stop the program crashing. Smoke testing is a tool that should be used by the expert, NOT a sole check given to a novice. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
