[TIP] doctest and floats

Ben Finney bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au
Tue Mar 11 10:45:50 PDT 2008


Andrew Bennetts <andrew-tip at puzzling.org> writes:

> Decide on what you're writing. If you're writing documentation, make
> it good documentation. If you're writing tests to make sure your
> code works, make it test comprehensively and accurately.
> 
> These can be conflicting goals. I don't believe it is always
> possible for great tests to be great documentation. [...]

Agreed.

> So the question might be which is the worse trade-off: having tests
> and documentation combined in a file that does a poor job of
> satisfying both needs, or having two files?

It's not necessarily either-or. One can have those doctests that *are*
good documentation in the docstrings
<URL:http://www.python.org/doc/lib/doctest-simple-testmod.html>, and
those doctests that are not good documentation in a separate file
<URL:http://www.python.org/doc/lib/doctest-simple-testfile.html> to be
loaded and run explicitly.

-- 
 \      "I busted a mirror and got seven years bad luck, but my lawyer |
  `\                     thinks he can get me five."  -- Steven Wright |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney




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