in reply to (jeffa) Re: RFC: Seconds2English
in thread RFC: Seconds2English

jeffa,
Ok - for example:
  • Ensuring that there was an even numbered list if assigning to a hash
  • Ensuring that division by 0 would not happen
  • Ensuring that a variable looked like a number before performing a numerical operation on it
  • Ensuring that if someone passes a bad option to the get routine it gets trapped in an eval

    These are the types of things that I did - how would I incorporate them into a test. I was under the impression that tests were designed to make sure your code works the same on someone else's platform and version of Perl as you coded it???

    Cheers and thanks - L~R

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    (jeffa) 3Re: RFC: Seconds2English
    by jeffa (Bishop) on Jul 18, 2003 at 21:42 UTC
      First off, read chromatic's Introduction to Testing article at perl.com if you already haven't.

      You test your interface and make sure that you get the expected results. Tests for the items that you mentioned are 'user errors' ... you write validation code for that instead. While i am sure that is possible to incorporate such 'contracts' into a test suite ... i am not sure that they belong there. Probably better is to pass some function an argument that would cause an illegal division by 0, and then test that the right error code or message was returned instead.

      jeffa

      L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)
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