Re: What is a “unit test?”

Pelle wrote:

> When people try to decide what a unit is they often settle on things too small anyway, like methods in Java.[...] I prefer higher level tests when possible.

I don’t write unit tests (that’d be almost as pointlessly redundant as type annotation) but I generate them automatically and they’re great. They let me refactor wildly and they help prevent old working code from breaking.

I like high-level tests, too. When I was first writing 7off (a markdown->gemini converter), I created a sample source file, and a hand-made target file that looked the way I wanted, and then as I was hacking, I kept looking at the diff between the program’s generated target with my handmade version. That’s actually still the only test in 7off’s test directory, which makes sense since it’s a single-procedure API.

For the other libraries I make, though, it’s pretty good to make sure they’re working. Their API is the finished thing, in some sense, and testing them is as high-level as you can get. Unit becomes the highest level.

It’s a quirk of Chicken’s module system that you can only test exported procedures.

Having unit tests is great. No more constantly neurotically checking in the REPL. Just relax and refactor away.

Automatically make unit tests

7off