I think unit tests serve these purposes:
- Document an API by example. (We do that in doctests.)
- Guard against regression. (Normal tests.)
- Test emergent properties, i.e. those that cannot be trivially deduced
from reading the source code. (Doctest or normal test, depending on
whether the test is also documentation-worthy or not.)
They can't make 100% sure that the code is valid, they can only increase
confidence.
And since we're in a grey area, we can weigh: Is the added effort to run
and possibly maintain a unit test worth the increased confidence in the
code's validity?
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