Day 4: Testing

Perl authors have a long tradition of shipping test cases with their modules, and in Perl 6 we plan to continue with that nice tradition.

And testing is very easy. The traditional perlish way is to print data in the Test Anything Protocol. But you don’t have to do that yourself, you can use a module for that.

Assume you have written a nice factorial function

 sub fac(Int $n) {
     [*] 1..$n
 }

Currently it doesn’t matter for us how that function works – we want to find out if it does. So let’s test it:

 use v6;

 sub fac(Int $n) {
     [*] 1..$n
 }

 use Test;
 plan 6;

 is fac(0), 1,  'fac(0) works';
 is fac(1), 1,  'fac(1) works';
 is fac(2), 2,  'fac(2) works';
 is fac(3), 6,  'fac(3) works';
 is fac(4), 24, 'fac(4) works';

 dies_ok { fac('oh noes i am a string') }, 'Can only call it with ints';

And let’s run it:

 $ perl6 fac-test.pl
 1..6
 ok 1 - fac(0) works
 ok 2 - fac(1) works
 ok 3 - fac(2) works
 ok 4 - fac(3) works
 ok 5 - fac(4) works
 ok 6 - Can only call it with ints

In detail: use Test; loads the testing module, plan 6; declares that we plan to run six tests. Then five lines of the pattern is $got, $expected, $description follow. is() does string comparison, but since integers always stringify the same way, that’s fine.

Finally with dies_ok { $some_code }, $description we test that calling the function with a non-integer argument is a fatal error.

The output contains the test plan 1..6, followed by one line for each test. That starts with ok (or not ok if the test failed), the test number, space, dash, space and test description.

If you run more tests, you don’t want to look through every test output carefully, but you want a summary. The prove command from Perl 5 gives you such a summary:

 prove --exec perl6 fac-test.pl
 fac-test.pl .. ok
 All tests successful.
 Files=1, Tests=6, 11 wallclock secs ( 0.02 usr  0.00 sys + 10.26 cusr  0.17 csys = 10.45 CPU)
 Result: PASS

You can also put all your test files in a directory, let’s call it t/, and run prove recursively on all .t files in that dir:

 prove --exec perl6 -r t

Putting that line in your Makefile is also nice, so that you can just type
make test to run the tests.