Exploring with doctest

Published on 14 May 2014.

Today’s thought is about using exploration to implement a function.

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with doctest in Python. Doctest allows you to write examples in the documentation string of a function that can be executed and checked automatically.

One approach I’ve used that I find valuable at times is to write an example where I make a call to the function I’m developing and expecting the outcome to be something it will obviously not be. Then when I run the example, I see the output (because it doesn’t match what I stated the expected output should be). At this point I can continue the implementation and see how the output of the function changes. When I’ve reached the desired result, I can copy the output of the example into the documentation string, and I now have a regression test.

Sometimes this exploratory style of programming has been useful. Sometimes I’ve ended up throwing the code away because what I was trying to do turned out to be a bad idea. But I like the exploratory environment with a doctest example and seeing the output change.

–

• Comments on Google+