[Zope3-dev] Re: doctests in *.txt files

[Tim Peters]

[Garrett Smith]
>> There's been some talk about enabling doctests from within *.txt
>> files (or some other file extension).
>>

...

> Nevermind...I just found:
>
>    zope/interfaces/adapter.txt
>
> Btw, anyone interested in a powerful idea for software
> testing/development, take a look at this.

FYI, Jim and I presented a paper about it at PyCon this week; the slides +
notes are onlone, fourth from the top ("Literate unit testing: Unit Testing
with Doctest") at:

    http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/papers/

Lots of people found me after the talk and admitted to being secret doctest
users.  It's been around for years, but I'm not a proselytizer, and some of
unittest's users are.  I guess doctest's users are just content to be
happier <wink>.

Something that became clearer after the slides were written:  unittest is
really (at least) two things, both a particular way of writing tests, and a
driver for running tests.  Jeremy's test.py (in Zope3, and also Zope2 too
now) supplies lots of helpful functionality beyond unittest in the latter
role.  So another thing I'd like to see in the standard Python library is a
test-runner component with Jeremy-like features, to work well with multiple
ways of writing tests.