BRASS

DESCRIPTION

BRASS is a standard assertions framework, framework's framework, or even a framework's framework's framework, depending on where you're staking out your assertions keister.

In other words, BRASS provides a standard rudimentary assertions framework that all other assertion and test frameworks can use, or at least comply with, and then everyone gets on swimingly.

Now, you may be thinking, "No thanks, I do it my way." But when you see how stupid simple BRASS is, you'll realize that, "Yea, that actually make sense." And then maybe feel a bit stupid yourself for doing exactly what this paragrah just said you would do. Yea, well, we've all been there.

But enough with the fluff.

BRASS defines two Kernel methods: assert and refute:

assert(truthiness, *fail_arguments)
refute(truthiness, *fail_arguments)

Where truthiness is any object evaluated for it's truth value (false and nil are false, everything else is true), and fail_arguments are exactly the same as those we would pass to the fail or raise methods.

The assert (and likewise refute) method does three things. First it tests the truthiness, then it ticks up the appropriate counts in the global assertions counter, and lastly, if truthiness came up short, it raises an error. This error is either RuntimeError or the one specified by the fail_arguments.

The global assertions counter is $ASSERTION_COUNTS. It is simply a Hash formally defined as:

$ASSERTIONS_COUNTS = Hash.new{|h,k| h[k] = 0}

And though it is open to any key, the keys should be symbols. Three keys in particular and standard: :pass, :fail and :total. Whenever an assertion passes, the :pass and :total counts are incremented, and whenever an assertion fails the :fail and :total counts are incremented. You might wonder why there is a total entry when the sum of the other two would do just as well. Well, other frameworks might want to add other counts, such as :skip. So to ensure we still get the proper total despite this, we keep a separate tally. Moving on....

Okay, last thing. When assert or refute raises an error, it marks the error as an assertion via the #set_assertion method. This is a method extension to the Exception class along with the #assertion? method which any test framework can use to distinguish an assertion error from an ordinarily error.

And that's all there is to it. If you capice then consider yourself top brass.

Love, Peace and Brass Knuckles

COPYING

Distribute in accordance with the BSD-2-Clause license.

See COPYING.md file for details.