Gergely Brautigam wrote:
One last question then I swear I will shut up :)
Why use perl for testing? Of course all others languages are used for testing
this
> and that.. What excels perl to be used for testing. Obviusly it has
powerfull regex,
> and datahandling capabilities... But besides that.. Why would anyone want
to use perl? :)
Something that hasn't been explicitly pointed out yet is that Perl uses TAP,
the Test Anything Protocol. In most other testing systems the test script
also determines whether the test passes or fails and it also displays that
fact. This means the thing you're testing is tied to the testing system.
TAP instead follows the Unix philosophy of pipes. A harness (usually
Test::Harness) runs a series of programs which output TAP, a simple textual
protocol.
1..3
ok 1
ok 2
not ok 3
That is, "I'm going to run 3 tests. The first one passed. The second one
passed. The third one failed." The harness parses this and displays the results.
This separation means you have maximum flexibility in how you write your
tests. You're not locked down to one set of test functions, you can import
piles and piles from CPAN and even write your own. You can even get XUnit
style test methods (see Test::Class).
With Test::Harness 3 you can define special behaviors for various test files.
The power of this is that the test scripts can be written in anything, doesn't
have to be Perl. There are TAP libraries in several languages and because the
basic protocol is so simple they're simple to implement. I've seem places
write TAP tests in C, shell, PHP and Java in the same test suite. Even
running their .html files as "tests" by instructing the harness to run them
through an HTML syntax validator.
The downside is there's no pretty GUIs for TAP, but the potential exists.
It's a simple matter of programing. The upside is that when a TAP GUI is
created it will work with all existing TAP tests.
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