[Haskell-cafe] Re: Testing and module export lists

[John Lato]

> From: Magnus Therning <magnus at therning.org>
>
> How do people who like unit testing / property testing deal with export lists?
>
> I often find that I do want an export list to reduce clutter in the
> finished code, but for testing I'd like to expose everything in a
> module.  Is there a nice way to deal with this (using the C
> pre-processor would not qualify as "nice" ;-)?
> Maybe there's a switch that causes GHC to simply ignore the export
> list of a module and export everything?

That would be a nice feature to deal with this problem.

The best solution I have is to separate functions that don't belong in
the public interface into separate modules that aren't exposed
(they're listed in the other-modules section of the .cabal file).  I
then add the test executable to the .cabal file, so when it's built it
can access the hidden modules (or I run the test from ghci).

Of course this only works if it makes sense to structure the code this way.

Cheers,
John