Tell Gus what you think, but remember- you are in his home. Be a good guest.

For me, complex parsing engines validate the existence of unit tests. Unit tests never forget a step, never miscount the number of columns you've indented a line, never remember that this was the right output when it was that. And nothing finds cross-module regressions like unit tests, as Duncan Wilcox points out in a comment to Wil Shipley's original post.

Try writing a VT102 emulator and passing the complete standard test suite without unit tests. I dare you.

Posted by Ben Stiglitz at September 24th 2005 08:29 AM

Is'nt that more like regression testing rather than unit testing?

Posted by Lemont Washington at September 24th 2005 10:48 AM

It's true that well-constructed unit tests do double duty as regression tests once a component is in a later stage of development, but unit tests are, of course, more than that; namely, you write them before you write bugs, instead of after you find them.

Posted by Ben Stiglitz at September 24th 2005 11:58 AM

Out of curiosity, what unit testing framework did you use and how do you like it?

Posted by Mike Bultrowicz at September 26th 2005 12:30 PM

I use the sen testing framework that comes with xcode 2.1. It's alright, although I'd rather be using UnitKit - it just feels better for some reason.

Posted by August Mueller at September 26th 2005 02:35 PM