I'm a fan of test-driven development, so as I was writing yet another test suite this evening it struck me that if the tests are written before the code, the test harness could generate the code. Obviously it would only be able to do so much, given the difficulties in parsing Perl, but even a wrapper that could build out class hierarchies and stubs would be better than nothing.

For instance use_ok($class) implies that $class should exist (perhaps after matching a user-defined prefix). isa_ok($obj, $class) implies that the methods subsequently called on $obj should exist in $class. We may even be able to figure out method signatures as well. A set of heuristics could be developed from the *.t files already on CPAN.

This could only ever provide a starting point for developers, but if it was any good it would provide even more motivation for writing tests.

Does something like this already exist? If not, would anybody else find it useful?

(I realise that methods exist to develop modules and tests from a class definition :-)).

In reply to Code Generation from Test Suites by Anonymous Monk

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