Eli Barzilay wrote at 08/29/2011 04:04 AM:
But all of that is unrelated to *testing*. By keeping things separate: not implementing such a form in a testing framework and referring people to the language for such things, you get more focused work, and if the language gets a better replacement form, then your testing library gets that too.
I agree in general, especially for general programming in the Racket language.
However, in response to Noel's suggestion, I'm thinking that there might be a place for some dumbed-down syntactic sugar for simple forms of setup and teardown. Specifically, "#:setup" and #:teardown" keyword arguments that are followed by expressions, and then expanded to something like "(dynamic-wind (lambda () SETUP) (lambda () CODE) (lambda () TEARDOWN)". Part of the rationale is that Overeasy might be considered a minilanguage for testing, perhaps used by a software test engineer, and by incorporating the setup and teardown into the "test" form, "test" can provide a nice little self-contained specification of most individual tests. When the dumbed-down syntactic sugar is adequate, it's prettier.
Note that this "#:setup" and "#:teardown" are not adequate for a single setup that is done for a sequence of more than one test. Also, this "#:setup" and "#:teardown" alone are not adequate for things like opening a database connection that yields a handle object that "#:code" must reference. ("dynamic-wind" is alone is not adequate for that either. Perhaps it would be easier to solve for a more restrictive relative of "dynamic-wind", which had a continuation barrier, so that "pre-thunk" could yield the database handle, and then that value would be passed to "value-proc" and "post-proc".)
I remain adamant that pretty much the entire Racket language should be available for intermixing with "test" in Overeasy, of course. Missing that was one of several ways that Testeez was unnecessarily dumb. But I am leaning towards *in addition* having sugar like "#:setup" and "#:takedown".
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