Facts and checks

Basic building block is of course a test case. Archimedes follows nose convention, where test function name starts with “test_”, so they’re easy to collect and execute programmatically. To define a test case, fact macro is used:

(fact "this is a test case"
  (assert (= 1 1)))

This will define a function, which is equivalent to:

(defn test_this_is_a_test_case []
  "this is a test case"
  (assert (= 1 1)))

Nose (or any other test framework that follows the convention) can then programmatically find this and execute it.

Sometimes one might want to execute test case immediately. This can be useful when working in interactive mode, be it Hy repl or Jupyter notebook. For these situations, there is check macro. It defines test case just like fact macro does and then executes it:

(check "this is executed immediately"
  (assert (= 1 1)))

Both of these support specifying common setup code that can be shared between several test cases. background macro specifies setup code with a unique name and with-background takes one or more variables from that specification in use. Since this probably sounds a bit confusing, an example is in order:

(background some-numbers
  a 3
  b 4
  c 5)

(fact "sum of two numbers"
  (with-background some-numbers [a b]
    (assert (= (+ a b) 7))))

(fact "product of three numbers"
  (with-background some-numbers [a b c]
    (assert (= (* a b c) 60))))

Background can contain arbitrarily many variable definitions and they can be more complex than simple values (calculations for example).