Ask HN: assertEquals, assertEqual, or assert_equal?

5 points·vlisivka··4 comments

Which variant I should use in my own unit-testing library for bash? I using assertEqual now, but I saw both assertEquals (shunit) and assert_equal (bash-unit).

English is foreign language for me, so it is hard to decide. :-/

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camelCase vs. underscore_delimited is really a religious preference: use whatever the people you're working with are using..

as far as equal vs. equals: both make sense, but I would favor 'equal' exactly because of this. I don't feel there is a need to constantly add a frivolous character to all of your statements.

In my experience, with SimpleTest in PHP and unittest2 in Python, assertEqual() seem to be the convention.

Indeed, in unittest2, both assertEquals() and assert_equal() both appear to be deprecated in favor of assertEqual().

It depends on how you read the code. Equals is the singular and would read as "I assert A equals B". Equal is the plural and would read as " I assert A and B are equal". I tend to think the second phrase, but both are correct from an English standpoint.

This is a nitpick, but "A equals B" uses the verb "equals", and "A and B are equal" uses the adjective "equal", describing a state of being. That said, reading code like English would probably suggest something like assertEqual(A,B) or A.assertEquals(B). At the end of the day, it's all just what looks best to you.

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