Part of the problem with have with 'Test::More' and friends is that there's not
an easy way to attach diagnostics to any test. This is largely because the
interface is set in stone. So I was thinking about a rewritten test interface
which allows something like this (this code actually works, by the way):
use Test::Fluent 'no_plan';
my ( $have, $want ) = ( 1, 1 );
have $have, want $want, reason 'Some test name';
have [ 3, 4 ], want [ 4, 5 ], reason 'cuz I said so'; # fails
true 3, reason '3 had better be true';
false 3, reason '3 had better still better be true'; # fails
At the end of each of those, you could append a 'diagnostics' tag which is
required to take a hashref:
my $armageddon = $world->destruction;
false $armaggedon,
reason "World->destruction must never return true",
diagnostic { world => $world };
I don't know that this is a brilliant interface, but just playing around with
it works (the have/want pair automatically falls back to Test::Differences if
$have or $want is a reference).
It's a lot more explicit that Test::More and friends. That means it's a lot
more verbose. However, it's something which could be played with.
Is this a bad idea? Are there other suggestions people want? If we had a dot
operator, it would be clean to write this:
have($have).want($want).reason($some_reason);
But we don't, so we'd have to fall back on the ugly:
have($have)->want($want)->reason($some_reason);
Though I could easily overload the dot operator to get the first syntax.
Or if we needed delayed evaluation for some reason:
have { $have }, want { $want }, reason $some_reason);
That's also ugly and requires the (&) prototype (and friends).
Thoughts? Am I totally smoking crack here? If there's a clean way to shoehorn
diagnostics on the Test::More-style interface, I guess that would be ok.
Cheers,
Ovid
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