Re^5: Auto-compile checking??? WTF?

[stevieb]

You're half way there then. Instead of using a single script that you keep changing, once you get your 'test' to run, copy it to a file with a .t extension and that's it.

Of course, using Test::More is a good choice for doing the assertions. Here's the difference between a normal test script, and a real test:

use warnings;
use strict;

use My::Module;

my ($x, $y) = My::Module->pairs();

print "ok" if $x == $y;

test:

use warnings;
use strict;

use Test::More;

use_ok('My::Module');

my ($x, $y) = My::Module->pairs();

is ($x, $y, "pairs() returns a pair that match");

done_testing();

The latter will tell you exactly what was expected and what failed if there's a fail. The former doesn't. Not much extra effort. So if you're testing your code with one-offs, save them to test files instead, and now that part of your code will be tested every time you run your suite.

Example test output from above on fail:

ok 1 - use My::Module;
not ok 2 - pairs() returns a pair that match
#   Failed test 'pairs() returns a pair that match'
#   at pairs.t line 11.
#          got: '1'
#     expected: '2'
1..2
# Looks like you failed 1 test of 2.

...because someone made a typo in the pairs() function:

sub pairs {
    return (1, 2);
}