Assertions in Ruby

ruby-talk
1

Ahh … now I see what you’re getting at. I’ll see if I can rewrite my
assertion code to build on top of assert.rb in RUnit. Thanks for the tip!

···

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Chen [mailto:alan@digikata.com]
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 1:36 PM
To: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Subject: Re: assertions in Ruby

On Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 03:07:53AM +0900, Volkmann, Mark wrote:

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Chen [mailto:alan@digikata.com]
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 11:37 AM
To: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Subject: Re: assertions in Ruby

On Fri, Oct 04, 2002 at 10:43:46PM +0900, Volkmann, Mark wrote:

Is anyone aware of a Ruby module that adds support for
assertions such as what
is supported in Java 1.4? I wrote such a thing yesterday
and am considering
releasing it if I’m not duplicating what someone else has
already done.
I’ve included some examples below showing how mine is used.

I have an unreleased, partailly completed module which include the
Test::Unit asserts when $DEBUG is set and do nothing otherwise. It
looks almost the same as yours. The only suggestion I
have is maybe
working it in with the Ruby::Unit or Test::Unit frameworks.
I’m not quite convinced that assertions should be
integrated with a unit
testing framework. They seem fundamentally different to me.
With assertions enabled, an application generally stops as
soon as one fails.
Results are not collected into a report since only one
failure is reported.
Assertions go in the code and remain there for
documentation purposes.
With unit tests, tests continue even if one fails. Results
are collected into
a report. Unit tests go in a separate class written
exclusively for testing
purposes.
What kinds of things do you envision that an assertion
framework borrow from a
unit testing framework?

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that unit testing and assertions should
be strongly tied together. Test::Unit for example provides a wide
range of asserts already. The Test::Unit assert code itself is a
fairly orthogonal module, and, as far as I know, has no other
dependencies on other parts of the unit test framework. So… I just
did something like the following:

if $DEBUG
module Myasserts
require ‘test/unit/assertions’
include Test::Unit::Assertions
end
else

all empty assert methods

module Myasserts
def flunk(msg);end
def assert(expr,msg);end
# other assertions omitted…
end
end

Now instead of Myasserts, an integrated module might be named
Test::Assertions. The main reason to separate into its own module is
that you always want the asserts to fire in a unit test, but not
always during an application run. I don’t really care if its
$DEBUG that controls it or some other flag. $DEBUG was just convenient
in my case.

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