Unit tests for real

To be really useful in practice, unit-test functions should be self-explanatory and stand-alone. In other words, they should either work silently or emit error messages, not just fail.

Resources

• The OCaml code for the exercise about the power function in Week 05 (latest version: 16 Mar 2020).

The key points

• Each clause should emit a meaningful error message.
• The unit-test function can then be tested with an incorrect function, to visualize the error messages.
• It is a good idea to have a global flag (i.e., a global definition) regulating whether or not to emit error messages.
• This global flag can then be checked when testing the unit-test function, in order not to emit error messages when failure is expected.

Version

Created [16 Mar 2020]