From: David Carlton <carlton@...>
Date: 2007-07-16T10:00:21+09:00
Subject: Re: weirdness with ruby unit testing on mac

On Mon, 16 Jul 2007 09:49:33 +0900, "Gregory Brown" <gregory.t.brown@gmail.com> said:
> On 7/15/07, David Carlton <carlton@bactrian.org> wrote:

>> I guess I'm curious why using require is good in ruby files but bad
>> from the command line.  Or is it bad in files too?  (And, if so,
>> what's the replacement?)  Is it just an issue of what's idiomatic
>> (no problem with that, idioms are important), or am I missing
>> something deeper?

> Oh, it's not really bad in either.  The issue is you're not trying to
> require code, you're trying to run it.  Require is used to load just
> once, usually to load in libraries.

> So what you are doing works fine, but it's unidiomatic.  When you do a
> require, you usually won't expect the code to *do* anything besides
> load class definitions and the like.

Yeah, that's a good point - makes a lot of sense when you put it it
that way.  In fact, maybe the weirdness is that the code _does_ do
anything, given that it's only class and method definitions!  I admit
that it's convenient that Test::Unit runs tests without being told
when it sees them, but it's still a strange blurring of boundaries...

Thanks for the insight,
David Carlton
carlton@bactrian.org