.. index:: blog; 2016/09/18

Impressed
=========

.. Modified: 2017-01-07/03:29-0500

Continue to be impressed by the responsiveness of the Unicon development team.

Unicon is building up toward release 13.  The beta working copies in SVN are
used to build up this document set, and rarely fail to deliver.

I've put in a few bug reports for edge case failures, and all the critical
ones have been fixed in well under an 8 hour window.  Much kudos to the team.

:ref:`Jafar` and :ref:`Clint` are two highly productive and engaged
developers.  Nice to be following.

Some examples: take a look at https://sourceforge.net/p/unicon/bugs/202/ and
https://sourceforge.net/p/unicon/bugs/200/.  The first, a segfault issue, and
the other a beta work in progress build failure.  Both fixed within 3 hours of
reporting.  Nice. *And this is on top of all the other code and documentation
commits that are happening.  Nicer.*

The UP docs
-----------
This Unicon Programming doc set is progressing along nicely.  Happy to have
taken on the task. There are so many features in Unicon that it is a complete
pleasure to add each new entry. Every sit down is a joy.

Unicon is both practical, and deep.  A single expression chain can be a wonder
to behold, and sometimes a challenge to come up with just the right idiomatic
Unicon.  Not hard, per se, but immensely satisfying.  Do you add an ``if`` or
use a conjunction?  Separate out an assignment or chain it inside an indexing
operation?  When things need to get done, they get done, but there are times
when pondering a single line, polishing and crafting, is more than half the
fun.  A sensation that I'd guess the great authors experience when the
sentence just seems perfect. *(Or perhaps the pleasure and pain, and the
angst, when the right combination of words seems just out of reach, only to
suddenly appear on the page, with a sigh of relief and a smile.)*

Unit testing
------------
Along with some experiments with inline expression evaluation, using Tasks and
multi-tasking loadable co-expressions, I've started in on a small Unicon unit
testing framework.  So far, some few 140 lines of framework code is allowing
for simple unit test passes.  For example:

.. literalinclude:: ../programs/unitest/literate.icn
   :language: unicon

.. only:: html

    .. rst-class:: rightalign

        :download:`../programs/unitest/literate.icn`

Sample run:

.. command-output:: unicon -s -DUNITTEST literate.icn -x
   :cwd: ../programs/unitest
  
This will be worked on, on the side, to see if it can't be made xUnit and/or
TAP compatible, with possible XML reporting features to allow for future
Unicon programs to take part in Jenkins style auto build setups.

*Have good, test well.*

.. post:: Sep 18 2016
   :tags: unit testing, kudos
   :category: unit test
   :author: Brian Tiffin
   :location: on.ca
   :language: en