[racket-dev] [racket] Disable/Enable Tests

From: Vincent St-Amour (stamourv at ccs.neu.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 29 16:02:19 EST 2011

At Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:48:32 -0500,
Stephen Bloch wrote:
> Those are probably the only REASONABLE sequences, but novice
> programmers will always find unreasonable ways to do it -- and those
> are the students I'm most worried about.
> 
> To reduce the space of possible mistakes, I'm sorta leaning towards
> a (with-tests-disabled ...) macro that cannot be nested.

Agreed.

Disabled tests should be the exception, so making them stand out is a
good idea IMO.

> Although as various people have pointed out, a typical workflow is
> more likely to ENABLE tests for a particular part of the program
> than to DISABLE tests for a particular part of the program.  We
> could address this by disabling check-expect by default, and
> providing a (with-tests-enabled ...) macro... but that would
> seriously break backwards compatibility for hundreds of teachers.

That sounds like the wrong default to me.

We stress that testing is really important. Having tests disabled by
default contradicts that.

Vincent


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