shaun:
Hello,
I am an experienced programmer, currently learning Haskell. Currently I write many things in python. I use both the "doctest" and "unittest" modules extensively. As I write code, I simultaneously write doctest code in the doc strings to explain/set out the "typical narrative" of how the code is used. Then finishing off a module I write unittests for boundary conditions, more complex test cases, and generally code that would be annoying to write & read in doctests.
I note that there is a unit testing framework for Haskell, but I don't see
There's a couple, QuickCheck is the best, it generalises unit testing to property testing with random, or not so random, data.
any doctest module. Might this be a good project? If so, suggestions as to resources would be greatly appreciated. I believe I can't just "introspect" Haskell modules to get at documentation/comments, like I can in python? (Why not? :)) I notice that there are a few "documentation generators". Should I try to write an extension of one of these? Haddock, for instance? Are there any Haddock developers hanging out on this list, to encourage or dissuade me? :) (And where is the Haddock doc for Haddock?)
In any case, thanks in advance for any comments & advice.
I'm not sure how doctest works, or how it would work in a Haskell setting, could you elaborate? One idea that does strike me is that it would be super useful to have the ability in ghci to extract the haddocks associated with a function. > :doc map would result in: -- | 'map' @f xs@ is the list obtained by applying @f@ to each element -- of @xs@, i.e., -- -- > map f [x1, x2, ..., xn] == [f x1, f x2, .. -- > map f [x1, x2, ...] == [f x1, f x2, ...] marked up in ascii. I'm not sure if that's related to doctest, but it sure would be useful! -- Don