but without a folding editor, it can get ugly

I'm curious... Do you have a folding printer? A folding 'grep'? Folding revision control diff/log/pickaxe tools? A folding merge tool? Do you never do anything with code other than "edit" it?

Even the old argument of "nobody updates the documentation unless it is within a few lines of the code that it documents" doesn't make sense for tests... unless you rarely run your tests.

I think I'll stick with keeping my test code in a separate directory tree and running the tests at least before any release / deploy. I like to be able to pickaxe for any changes to calls to the fooBiff() method either excluding test code, or including test code, or only in test code. I like being able to tell that nobody touched the Foo::Biff implementation in this release. I like to be able to see how much work is being spent on fixing unit tests, especially when the immediate implementation wasn't touched.

Do you just hardly ever do such things? Or do you not find having your test code jumbled around with your implementation code makes such things much harder? Or do you find it harder but find the juxtaposition of test and code outweighs such hurdles?

I think somebody should write a "merging" editor feature so you can keep your different types of text in separate files for all of your tools that aren't your editor and then teach your editor how to shuffle the appropriate parts of the disparate files together on the screen when editing. :)

I cannot say that I disagree with any of your comments, as I have been moving away from this tool (on revision) when I touch parts of my codebase.

Chalk it up to lack of experience in development (looks like 6ish years ago) and interaction with other tools. I used this solution when the "approved" rev control method in my environment was file based (sccs - not my choice), and not project based (now, git - my choice). At that time, my goal was to be able to link the revision of the test with the revision of the file it was testing. It did the job at the time. Since I switched to git, I don't find Test::Inline "necessary" anymore.

I still, however, use a folding editor. Being able to demote things unessential to the task at hand is useful to me.

Does a fanfold printer count as a folding printer? ;-b

--MidLifeXis

Thanks!

- tye