Hi,

On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 10:13 AM, Ralf Gommers
<ralf.gomm...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 1:29 AM, Gael Varoquaux
> <gael.varoqu...@normalesup.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 05:25:20PM -0600, Charles R Harris wrote:
>> >    Well, doc tests are just a losing proposition, no one should be using
>> > them
>> >    for writing tests. It's not like this is a new discovery, doc tests
>> > have
>> >    been known to be unstable for years.
>>
>> Untested documentation is broken in my experience. This is why I do rely
>> a lot on doctests.
>
> Rely as in making sure that the examples run once in a while and before a
> release is of course a good idea. Failures can be inspected and ignored if
> there are only minor differences in string representation.

I think automated and frequent testing of the doctests considerably
reduces the risk of broken documentation.

If the code-base gets big enough, scanning the errors by eye isn't
efficient, and the result can only be running the tests less often and
detecting errors less often.

> Relying on doctests as in "they replace the unit tests I should also have
> written" is another thing altogether - unnecessary and expecting an
> unrealistic level of backward compatibility. That of course doesn't mean
> things in numpy should change without a good reason, but it seems there was
> one.

I don't think anyone suggested that doctests should replace unit
tests; it's a bit difficult to see why that discussion started.

Best,

Matthew
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