A simple scheme unittest DSL
May 23rd, 2007 by Phil Dawes
One of the first things I wrote when I was in the ‘nesting’* phase of learning gambit scheme was a unittest DSL. Part of this was that I wanted an excuse to use r5rs syntax-rules macros, but the real motivation was that I’d been seduced by the idea of using tests for documentation ala Nat Pryce’s ‘Protest’. Here’s what I came up with: (example):
(define-tests bus-tests
(drive-to-next-stop ; name of fn/class/symbol being tested
("takes bus to next stop"
(drive-to-next-stop bus)
(assert-equal 'next-stop (bus 'position)))
("doesn't stop off at chipshop on the way"
; test code to detect chipshop hasn't been stopped at
))
(pick-up-passengers
("picks up passengers from the bus stop"
test code )
("doesn't leave passengers at the stop"
test code )
("waits for old lady running to the stop"
test code )))
The point is that it’s easy to write some lisp to traverse this code and generate documentation from it.
I found when using protest in python that the documentation angle reinforced some healthy habits: When you write tests you naturally think ‘how would this look to another person?’ ‘how can I document the behaviour of this?’ which encourages more complete testing. Also when you look at generated documentation it’s easy to see which bits you aren’t testing because the documentation is missing (which then encourages you to write more tests).
The implementation is a bit clunky and makes use of gambit exceptions as a way of terminating tests early because of assert failures (which is a bit rubbish). What probably should be happening is that the outer macro should be re-writing each assert as an ‘if’ or something to conditionally execute the rest of the test. (which would portable to other scheme implementations)
To be honest I knocked this up as fast as I could so that I could move onto writing other things (I’m developing a data aggregation and indexing tool), but the point of this post is more to convey the idea than the implementation.
That said, the crufty (currently gambit specific) implementation is here - hope this is interesting/useful to somebody.
* nesting as in ‘building a nest’
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