Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering 
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

Yesterday, I posted on a trivial little testing library I hacked together. Get the source through Rob’s git repository (see below).

In the meantime, I discovered a problem with the idea of intercepting comparison operators, the technique used by the expect method. Ruby doesn’t really have != and !~ methods. Instead, the parser maps(a != b) into !(a == b). This means that the ComparisonProxy cannot intercept calls to either of these. This is a problem because

expect(1) != 1

actually passes, because it becomes !(expect(1) == 1), and the expect method is happy with that.

I’m betting there’s a way around this…

Update: 14:26 CDT.

Rob Sanheim has set up a Git repository for the code. He says

git clone git://github.com/rsanheim/prag_dave_testing.git

Michael Neumann suggested a way around the negated == and =~ tests using source inspection:

class ComparatorProxy
   def ==(obj)
     # try to get the source code position of the call
     # and see if it's a != or a ==
   end
end
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