[Haskell-cafe] order of assertEqual arguments is counterintuitive

[Hécate]

I have also been bitten by this order, but I can also blame myself for 
not reading the documentation and relying on my previous experience with 
other libraries, thus building an intuition that I believed was 
universal (when it was in fact not).

I don't think it's worth much arguing about the order of things or the 
"intuition" at play here, since fortunately this library comes with a 
manual. Very few software match our mental expectations, and even the 
one we write are specifically tailored for our selves of a given time 
and place. And as we all know, we are a stranger to our future selves.


Cheers

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Le 01/03/2022 à 18:56, Daneel Yaitskov a écrit :
> Hi List,
>
> I noticed, that I pay more attention than I should, when working with 
> assertions, because I am not sure about argument order i.e. whether 
> the expected value goes first or vice-versa. Does anybody have similar 
> thought?
>
> Such subtle detail should be easy to grasp with regular practice, but 
> I observe difficulties and I suspect that there is a logical reason 
> for that.
>
> Unit tests appeared long time ago in Java and spread over all 
> languages. HUnit library inherited de facto standard assert function 
> name and signature. I don't know reasoning behind original signature.
>
> I spell "assertEqual" expression as:  "Assert that x equals to y"
> "y" sounds like a model value (i.e. expected value).
>
> In assignments |"x <- y"| y is the model value, because it defines |"x"|.
> You get |"x"| - value on the left not on the right.
>
> Similar issue with test fixing - I always have to check first, that an 
> expected value is actually one. There is no type safety preventing 
> mixing arguments. I had to open and comprehend a source file with 
> test, because test log is not 100% safe.
>
>
>
> -- 
>
> Best regards,
> Daniil Iaitskov
>
>
>
>
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