On 15 Oct 2007, at 10:25, Wincent Colaiuta wrote: > - The customer/client (not necessarily with any programming > knowledge) writes the stories in a format which is (almost) plain > text. > - The developer then writes custom "step matchers"; where do they go? > - How much of parsing can be generalized and done by RSpec itself > without requiring the developer to spend too much time writing the > matchers?
I'm a bit sceptical about all this (not to suggest that Wincent necessarily is!). I don't fully grasp the implications of the proposal either but superficially it smells like using a sledgehammer to crack the rather straightforward nut of having something that works like string interpolation. What's the problem with the alternating 'string', parameter, 'string', parameter, 'string' syntax? It might be less aesthetically beautiful than punctuation-free plain text but conceptually it expresses exactly what you're trying to achieve without all of that tedious mucking about with matching. I'm biased, I suppose; as a Ruby programmer a big part of the conceptual beauty of examples comes from them being written in native code, so I'd be sad to see that go out of the window with scenarios, but I appreciate the pull of the customer-facing aspect. Regardless I believe (without evidence) that trying to pretend we're doing something fundamentally different to writing a program when constructing a scenario is a recipe for confusion at best, and the "but customers will balk at apostrophes and commas!" sentiment feels slightly too specious to justify it. Cheers, -Tom _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
