[ruby-talk:11861] Re: Files and Styles

Ron Jeffries <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>I noticed that RubyUnit is divided into one class or module per file.
>Some of the modules seem to be included only once.

This is typical in a number of languages.  Within
Unix files are your logical unit of organization.
Many people map the logical units in the language
(eg classes and modules for Ruby) onto files.  Others
are more willing to put 5 classes in one.  There is
no enforced connection between classes and files, but
it is generally good to have any given class pretty
much in one piece.  (Rather than defined in one place
and extended in 5 other files.)

Personally I prefer to see each publically accessible
interface (ie class or module) in its own file, but I
have little or no preference about whether private
classes are in the original or spread out.  Of course
as you discover reusable components, they are likely
to spread into new files of their own...

>The various files have a bunch of requires one to the other.

The end user should be able to just load the file(s)
that represents the public interface and all else
should be imported.

Note that there is some startup overhead for loading
files.  Normally I don't worry about that, but if you
are writing something widely used or always loaded,
there are times that it is worth either moving stuff
externally to be autoloaded, or else inlining multiple
files into one.

>When using RubyUnit, it seems one has to write code like this:
>
>   require 'runit/cui/testrunner'
>   RUNIT::TestCase.subclasses.each do | sc |
>     RUNIT::CUI::TestRunner.run(sc.suite)
>  end
>
>with lots of :: and random names.
>
>Is RubyUnit a good example of how to organized Ruby code? If so,
>please discuss. If not, what is? (And discuss that.)

I didn't find it difficult to use RubyUnit, but I did
not look at the design/implementation closely enough
to have a strong opinion one way or another.  It allowed
me to test what I wanted...

Cheers,
Ben
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