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byby | 2 years ago

>Output formatting is still a type of transformation!

I'll quote part of my reply (which you missed):

   (Btw making print formatting unit testable means segregating the formatting from the print. Produce the string first, test that, then print, because print can never be unit tested by definition)
Right? Think about it. You want to unit test your formatting, remove the logic from the atomic IO function. Otherwise you can't test it via a unit test because that's the definition of unit testing. I realize that there is formatting that's part of the internal functionality of printf, but really all that means is that funcitonality can never really be unit tested. If you want to test printf, that happens at the integration level... By Defintion.

>BTW I gave ChatGPT the prompt I would give, and I have to say the answer looks pretty good, even if I'm not a Python programmer and it's not the way I'd do it (which would be to change the function to allow passing in an output stream):

It's wrong in this case. Unless you specifically asked it to write unit testable code, what it did here is write a hack that monkey patches the program. It's a huge hack. It didn't write unit testable code, but rather it wrote a integration test that monkey patches stdout, negating any need to make your code "unit testable" no refactoring needed using this method. The entire concept of refactoring code to be unit testable flies out the door in this case as you're just using integration tests to get around everything.

I mean yeah you use the unit test library but is not technically a unit test. It's fine I'm not a stichler for what style of testing is used in practice but what I am saying is that what chatgpt did previously was literally follow my instructions to the letter. It did it exactly 100% correctly. Think about it. I asked chatgpt to make the Code more unit testable. You didn't have chatgpt do anything to the code. You simply changed the test from a unit test to integration test. Huge difference. I mean if your case was the "proper" way then what does it even mean to make code "unit testable" if you're not even touching the code? Like why does the concept of "making code more unit testable" even exist if we're just changing tests to make everything unit testable? Ask yourself this and you'll realize that the only answer is basically what I just told you previously.

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wizofaus|2 years ago

I've been writing unit tests for over 15 years (actually longer, but before that they were just throwaway run-once testing stubs). I wouldn't consider what you got ChatGPT to produce to be an adequate rewrite of a function to make it unit testable (and several others in this thread have expressed the same view). Even the "hack" using monkey patching makes for a more actually-useful test.