On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Jeff King <p...@peff.net> wrote: > On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 10:38:03AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > >> >> This is way off tangent, but I am somewhat sympathetic to Felipe's >> >> "compare actual with expect", with reservations. >> > >> > This isn't an argument either way, but note that JUnit (and NUnit and >> > PHPUnit) all have assertEquals methods that take the arguments in the >> > order "expect, actual". I've always assumed that Git's test framework >> > was imitating that,... >> >> No. See 82ebb0b6 (add test_cmp function for test scripts, >> 2008-03-12). The "test_cmp" was a replacement for "diff -u", and >> the same order we fed "diff -u", i.e. expect then actual, was >> carried over. > > I don't think it was intentional at the time. But over the intervening 5 > years, I have noticed that I certainly think of "test_cmp A B" as > "differences from A to B", and the order makes sense. IOW, the "test_cmp > is diff" abstraction is leaky, and that is fine (if it were not leaky, > then order would not matter at all, but it clearly does). > > But let's take a step back. This seems like an endian-ness issue to me. > I.e., some people prefer one order for test assertions, and other people > prefer the other. Is anyone actually right, or is this simply a matter > of preference? And if it is simply a matter of preference, then why > bother going through the pain of changing the current project standard? > > Though I prefer the current, I can certainly live and adapt to a changed > standard, and I do not mind doing so if there is a good reason. But I've > yet to see any argument beyond "it is not what I like". Which to me > argues for the status quo as the path of least resistance.
Didn't Junio already provided reasoning? Here's more; human semantics: Computer, compare A with B cmp(A, B) Why would I write? cmp(B, A) Could you even construct an English sentence that starts with B, and then A? -- Felipe Contreras -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
