Testing Functions Internal to a Module

Testing Functions Internal to a Module

[Noah Lavine]

Hello Guile developers,

I have recently hit an issue and I wish I knew a standard way to handle it.

I want to write tests for a module of mine. Because I like being
paranoid, I'd like to test almost every function in the module. But a
lot of these functions are internal to the module - there's no reason
to export them, except that my test suite needs access to them. So my
choices are to export functions that I don't really want to export, or
to put a bunch of internal module references at the top of my test
program.

Is there a standard way of handling this?

This seems like a place where perhaps a helper procedure would be
useful, because lots of test suites will face this issue. Something
like "import all of this module's private definitions". What does
everyone else do in this situation?

Thanks,
Noah

Re: Testing Functions Internal to a Module

[Ian Price]

Noah Lavine <noah549@gmail.com> writes:

> Is there a standard way of handling this?
>
> This seems like a place where perhaps a helper procedure would be
> useful, because lots of test suites will face this issue. Something
> like "import all of this module's private definitions". What does
> everyone else do in this situation?
When testing at the repl, I've used ,m to great effect, and presumably
you could use set-current-module and co. in a similar way.

Alternatively, you could use (@@ (module name) procedure-name) to access
a private function. Maybe with a helper like

(define-syntax-rule (use-privates module proc-name ...)
  (begin (define proc-name (@@ module proc-name)) ...))

-- 
Ian Price

"Programming is like pinball. The reward for doing it well is
the opportunity to do it again" - from "The Wizardy Compiled"