[Haskell-cafe] "doctest" for haskell -- a good project?

[Sebastian Sylvan]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 8:39 AM, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:

> 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!
>

To be honest, I think this is what we should see when we type ":info map".
Preferably we'd get a proper GUI version of GHCi which prints it out into a
HTML box or something with proper hyperlinks and formatting.



-- 
Sebastian Sylvan
+44(0)7857-300802
UIN: 44640862
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20080322/cee14b21/attachment.htm