From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2003-02-07T12:10:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Return values from assertions

On Friday, February 7, 2003, 2:01:41 PM, Matt wrote:

>> Therefore, failures and errors highlight different problems in the
>> code, and this is a practical difference.

> Even more to the point, I don't see a point to RubyUnit's
> assert_no_exception or Test::Unit's assert_nothing_raised.
> Conceptually, you're saying "this code shouldn't raise an exception
> that is not handled" but that is pretty much universally true.

I see a point.  It enables you to unit-test an operation that doesn't
return anything, but which raises an exception on failure.  You could
just call it and let it be an error instead of a failure, but
assertions are a good way to document what you're testing.

It would perhaps be better to specify which exceptions are "expected",
because obviously you can have some sort of run-time exception that
you didn't expect, and should be informed about.  I've done this a few
times:

  begin
    method_to_be_tested
  rescue ApplicationSpecificException
    fail "..."
  end

Gavin